
Class 3Tl^ 
Book &&> 

Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Present Day Theology 



BY 

Washington Gladden 



mcclelland & company 
columbus, ohio 



.G-4, 



Copyrighted, 1913 

By 

WASHINGTON GLADDEN 



/?/&* 



A35 1714 



TO MY 

FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS IN COLUMBUS 

AMONG WHOM I HAVE LIVED 

FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS, 

AND WHOSE WELFARE AND HAPPINESS 

ARE VERY DEAR TO ME, 
THESE PAGES ARE LOVINGLY INSCRIBES. 



(iii) 



PREFACE. 



THESE lectures took the place of the regular Mid- 
week Service in our church, beginning early in 
January, 1913. The first lecture was given in 
the Chapel, but its capacity was taxed, and the remain- 
ing lectures were heard by audiences which comfortably 
filled our church auditorium. Such an attendance, on a 
week-day evening, is an indication that people are not 
averse to theological discussion. I am sure that no 
scientific, literary, or sociological themes which I could 
have offered, would have drawn half so large an au- 
dience. 

This ground has been gone over more than once, in 
this pulpit; two volumes, — "Burning Questions," and 
"How Much is Left of the Old Doctrines?" — are both 
made up of Sunday evening lectures on theological ques- 
tions, and it was therefore somewhat difficult to find fresh 
material ; but circumstances seemed to warrant a re-state- 
ment of the central truths of our religion, and it was 
gratifying to see that they have not lost their hold on the 
human heart. 

The lectures were, of course, intended for our own 
congregation, but as many of the other churches were 
closed, a large number of the members of other congre- 
gations were present at most of them. The interest man- 
ifested by these has lfd to this publication. 

(v) 



vi PREFACE. 

The book is printed and published in Columbus, and 
I hope that it may be accepted as an offering of the best 
I have to give, to the people of my own city. It is truth 
which has been tested, and which has been found good 
to live by. It is not, however, a local gospel; it will 
prove just as true at any other latitude and longitude. 

When a thing has been said by others better than I 
can say it, I feel that those to whom I speak are entitled 
to hear it. It has always been my custom, therefore, to 
quote freely, giving due credit. In this way I acknowl- 
edge my indebtedness to those who have helped me, and 
sometimes, I hope, do a service to my hearers and my 
readers, by introducing to them my friends. 

W. G. 
First Congregational Church, 
Columbus, O., May 6, 1913. 



CONTENTS. 

I. 
Introductory 1 

II. 
God and Man 21 

III. 
Nature and the Supernatural 41 

IV. 
Sin and Salvation 63 

V. 

Heaven and Piell 91 

VI. 
The Incarnation 121 

VII. 
The Atonement 147 

VIII. 
Forgiveness 175 

IX. 

The Life Everlasting 199 

(vii) 



I. 

INTRODUCTORY, 
(i) 



'Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect 
He could not, what h'e knows now, know at first; 
What he considers that he knows to-day, 
Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown, 
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns 
Because he lives, which is to be a man, 
Set to instruct himself by his past self; 
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, 
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, 
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law." 

Robert Browning, 

(2) 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

OUR preachers in past generations, were in the 
habit of preaching courses of doctrinal ser- 
mons quite frequently, going over the same 
ground again and again, and trying to get their people, 
as they used to say, ''thoroughly indoctrinated." It was 
a rational thing to do; it resulted in generations of 
strong men and women who had ideas and could stand 
for them ; who had convictions and could fight for them. 
Those doctrinal sermons represented the freshest and 
best thought of their day; it was in harmony with such 
knowledge of the universe and its laws as they had. It 
is not the thought of this day, and it is not in harmony 
with our knowledge; but it was the thought of that day, 
and it gave direction to study, and motive to choice, and 
vigor to conduct. 

This generation needs to have the highest and best 
thought of the day, on these great themes of the religious 
life, presented with the same clearness and the same full- 
ness and the same frequency. 

When these subjects are presented in the form in 
which they were presented fifty years ago they fail to 
produce conviction in the minds of men; they cannot be 

(3) 



4 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

believed. In many pulpits they are so presented; and 
although those who receive their instruction sometimes 
accept it, because their fathers and mothers accepted it, 
and because nothing better has been offered them, it is 
apt to result in spiritual tragedies when those who have 
been misled by it find their way out into other asso- 
ciations and come in contact with the larger knowledge 
of which they have been kept in ignorance. 

Painful cases often come under my notice of young 
men and women who have received their religious edu- 
cation in churches where the old ideas are still enforced, 
with no modification, and who have found themselves 
confounded and bewildered by the utter impossibility of 
reconciling these ideas with other demonstrated truths 
of which they have been put in full possession. In my 
service as preacher in the universities I have been as- 
tounded by the kind of questions that have been put to 
me by students, supposed to be well educated, who have 
always been church-goers, in intelligent communities, but 
who are still stumbling over conceptions of religious 
truth which it has been impossible for any intelligent 
teacher to hold for a quarter of a century. These young 
men were in deep trouble; they saw that these things 
could not be true, yet they did not dare to let them go ; 
they were afraid to go back and confess to parents and 
pastors that they have changed their views on these 
questions. They evidently expected to be treated as 
apostates. The impulse was to dismiss the whole matter 
from their minds. The agnosticism which we find in 
many colleges and universities is thus naturally accounted 
for. 



INTRODUCTORY. 

What right has any minister of the Gospel to send 
out young men and women from his church into the 
world in such a benighted condition, liable to be wrecked 
in their religious thinking, as soon as they come in con- 
tact with the living and constructive thought of their 
generation? If he is so stupid or so ignorant or so indo- 
lent or so cowardly that he cannot find out and deliver 
the truth that God is revealing to the world today, let 
him get out of the pulpit. A coal mine would furnish 
him a more fitting environment, and a far more useful 
occupation. 

The indignation which is always kindled in me at 
finding these souls in this forlorn and helpless plight, 
with no clear and solid convictions of religious truth, 
no light to guide them that the first breath of modern 
thought will not blow out, is part of my reason for tak- 
ing up these truths at this time. I do not want the 
young men and women who go out from this church to 
be exposed to such perils. I want them to get concep- 
tions of religious truth which they can anchor to and 
build upon. I want them to know that they have a 
faith and that it has foundations. I want them to get 
such a grip on the great facts of the Gospel as shall 
give them conviction, courage, vigor, an all-conquering 
faith. The Christian truth of this day is able to make 
the men and women of this day strong, brave, happy 
Christians ; but they must get hold of it, and understand 
it and make it their own. And this means that it must 
be taught frankly and explicitly and with all needful 
iteration. One of the wisest and strongest of our modern 
Christian teachers, President King, emphasizes and 



6 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



illustrates this fact, that the teacher must not be afraid 
of the repetition which shall fix the truth in the minds 
of those whom he is instructing. I trust, therefore, that 
though these themes have been gone over more than once 
in this place you will not find the repetition irksome. 
The subjects we are dealing with are so large and so 
many-sided, that we ought to find new significance in 
them at every approach. 

I am to speak upon Present Day Theology. It ought 
to be said that the phrase cannot be narrowly defined. 
There is no synod or council or general assembly which 
is authorized to formulate its beliefs ; there are no creeds 
which set forth its affirmations. Its content must be gath- 
ered from many sources — from books, sermons, ad- 
dresses, articles in reviews — from the current discus- 
sions of theological questions. Many different kinds of 
notions and theories would claim the name of present 
day theology, and there is no copyright or trade-mark 
which entitles any of them to denounce the others as 
spurious. But, for that matter, the same may be said of 
the old theology; there are wide diversities among those 
who claim to teach the only true and genuine orthodoxy. 
I shall, therefore, only try to give you, as well as I can, 
out of a pretty full acquaintance with current religious 
thought, the ideas which thoughtful and intelligent men 

— men well accredited in all the leading denominations 

— are now accepting. The idea of the immanence of 
God; the idea that God's method of creation is the 
method of evolution ; the idea that nature in all its deep- 
est meanings is supernatural ; the idea of the constant 
presence of God in our lives* the idea of the universal 



INTRODUCTORY. I 

divine Fatherhood and of the universal human Brother- 
hood, with all that they imply, — these are ideas which 
are here to stay. They involve, as President King has 
shown us in the book which bears this title, a "Recon- 
struction of Theology." That reconstruction is going 
on, and it is a movement of vast importance. 

To name a few of the leaders in it in this country 
may be suggestive. First and greatest among them is 
the name of one no longer with us, Bishop Phillips 
Brooks ; after him come men like Dean Hodges and Pro- 
fessor Nash of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cam- 
bridge; President Hyde of Bowdoin College, President 
Harris, recently of Amherst; President Tucker of Dart- 
mouth; President King of Oberlin; the two Professors 
Moore of Cambridge; Professors Evans and Fitch of 
Andover; Dean Charles R. Brown of New Haven; the 
late Professor Borden P. Bowne of Boston University, 
the greatest thinker among the Methodists ; the two Pro- 
fessors Brown and Professor Hugh Black of the Union 
Theological Seminary, and Professor William Newton 
Clarke, the most eminent of Baptist Theologians, who 
has lately gone to his rest. I am naming only a few rep- 
resentatives out of many, in positions of leadership and 
responsibility as religious teachers in some of the greater 
denominations; I am not speaking of the hundreds of 
preachers and teachers and editors and authors who are 
bearing their testimony in manifold ways. These are 
voices that are not likely to be silenced; the truth they 
are telling is mighty and it will prevail. The day of 
apology and defence for the present day theology has 
gone by; the day has come when it should be preached 



8 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



with conviction and enthusiasm as truth which is worthy 
of all acceptation. 

The present day theology, then, is simply the ex- 
planation which men are giving of religious truth in the 
light of this century. Increasing knowledge of the 
world, and of ourselves and of the Bible calls for new 
explanations of the facts of religion. New light is 
always breaking forth; we see these great themes in 
the new light and discover that our former theories of 
them need to be reshaped. This has been true in all 
the ages of the world, and it will always be true. God 
is always making all things new in the order of nature, 
and, therefore, in the world of theory old things are 
passing away and all things are becoming new. 

The principal facts of religion do not change. All 
the subjects of which we shall speak in this course of 
lectures have been subjects of thought from time im- 
memorial : God and Man, Nature and the Supernatural, 
Sin and Salvation, Heaven and Hell — these are not new 
words, nor are the facts which they connote new facts. 
But we see all of them in a different light from that in 
which the wisest men were looking at them even fifty 
years ago; when we put into words our best thought 
about them, these words will convey a different mean- 
ing from that which the best men found in them fifty 
years ago — a larger meaning, to our minds a more 
convincing meaning, because more in harmony with all 
the rest of the truth we know. 

The facts of astronomy have not greatly changed 
within the past six hundred years. Though a few 
heavenly bodies nave disappeared, the face of the 



INTRODUCTORY. » 

heavens has not perceptibly altered. But our knowl- 
edge of the facts of astronomy and our explanation of 
its phenomena and forces have mightily changed during 
this period. In the first place we have evidence of the 
existence of vast numbers of these heavenly bodies which 
were not known to the men of Ptolemy's time; perhap? 
our heavens are a thousand times more extended and 
more populous with worlds than were theirs. In the 
second place our whole account of the constitution and 
the motions of these heavenly bodies is radically different 
from theirs. The sun and the moon and the stars gave 
them the same light they give us; for the practical 
purposes of life the heavens were to the earth in their 
day not very different from what they are in our day, 
but the explanations which they gave of them are very 
different from the explanations which we give. 

Much the same might be said of the facts of geog- 
raphy and of geology, and of physics, and of chemistry, 
and of physiology, and even of history. The facts of 
most of these sciences have not greatly changed but our 
knowledge of the facts has been wonderfully enlarged, 
and our way of accounting for them has been greatly 
changed. 

The same thing is true of the facts of religious 
knowledge and of the religious life. We have the 
same essential verities to deal with that Augustine and 
Luther and Calvin and Wesley had, only these facts 
have been marvelously multiplied and extended; the 
universe in which we live is a vastly greater universe 
than that of which they knew, and we are compelled by 
our enlarging knowledge of God and man, of nature and 



10 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

the supernatural, to give very different explanations of the 
things we know than those which sufficed for them. 

Consider, for a moment, how our ideas of time have 
been extended, and what an immense range our thought 
has been given over the history of the race. The men 
who framed the creeds by which we have been trying 
to live for the past three hundred years supposed that 
the entire physical universe came into being not more 
than six thousand years ago; that no longer ago than 
that the earth, the sun, the moon, and all the hosts of 
heaven were created out of nothing within six days of 
twenty-four hours each. But during the past century 
men have been studying the crust of the earth, observ- 
ing the manner in which mountains are builded and 
water courses are carved out, tracing the movements of 
glacial masses, watching the coral insects at their tasks, 
reading the record written upon the rocks, and they now 
know by a knowledge that is as sure as any they possess 
that this earth is millions of years of age. How much 
older is the sun and the other host, of 

"The numerable-innumerable 
Sun, sun and sun, through finite-infinite space, 
In finite-infinite time," 

no man can pretend to know. It may be, as Sir Alfred 
Russell Wallace has taught, that ours is the only sphere 
of all these millions on millions that is inhabited; 
though that is a negative which it would be hard to 
prove. But this globe of ours has been inhabited, we 
know, for a long period. Here, again, our data are 
incomplete; we only know that the old idea that the 



INTRODUCTORY. 



11 



creation of man took place about 4,000 years before 
Christ was born is altogether inadequate; very con- 
servative scholars think that he must have been here 
at least thirty thousand years; some of them would 
multiply that figure by seven or ten. At all events we 
are sure that tool-using men have been at work upon 
this planet for a long, long day, and the conception of 
the vast multitudes that lived and perished here before 
the dawn of history, ages on ages before Abraham was, 
or any sign of the religion which we profess had ap- 
peared upon the earth, presents to us a serious problem 
for faith. What became of these unknown ancestors of 
ours? "We have to reckon," says Dr. Gordon, "with 
the stupendous problem which history thus extended 
presents to Christian faith. The only possible solution 
is that which sees in the evolutionary process the re- 
demptive movements of God. If one believes in a Chris- 
tian God one must find a Christian interpretation of 
human history. It is impossible, without self-stultifi- 
cation, to consider the question of salvation only from 
the modern point of view, or to rest content when the 
process is followed back into the civilization of Israel. 
We have a pre-Hebrew, a prehistoric world of un- 
imaginable extent and impressiveness to confront, a 
world beside whose population the inhabitants of the 
entire historic period are but as a drop to the ocean." 

These are facts which were wholly unknown to the 
men who fashioned our traditional creeds, and the dis- 
covery of them is sure to call for some reshaping of 
long-accepted theories about God and man. 

All that I have been saying involves, of course, 



12 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

evolution as the method of creation. This is a fact 
from which no intelligent person can get away : it has 
revolutionized science and philosophy; it must be 
reckoned with in all our theological explanations. 
Only we must not make a god of evolution, as too 
many people do. You often hear men talking about it 
as if it were a deity that had pushed God from his 
throne and supplanted him. People say that evolution 
has done this and evolution that, as though evolution 
were an omnipotent power, and not simply a method by 
which God has created the worlds and is bringing 
forth order and beauty. The more sure we are that 
things have come to be what they are through slow and 
gradual changes, extending over vast periods, the greater 
is our need of a directing intelligence to guide the 
entire process from its dateless beginning to the far off 
divine event. "Not only," says President King, of 
Oberlin, "is the religious interest not opposed to the 
scientific interest; in one important particular it is 
identical with it. For its own sake, theology can remain 
satisfied no longer with the old, inconsistent view of a 
virtual independence of the world in the larger part of 
it, and of direct dependence on God at certain points 
only, where we cannot yet trace the process of God's 
working. It is quite unwilling to say God is only 
where we cannot understand him. It is quite unwilling 
to admit that increasing knowledge of God's working 
is increasing elimination of him from the universe. It 
is quite unwilling to take its stand on gaps or base its 
arguments for God on ignorance. It believes in Godw- 
in a God upon whom the whole universe, in every least 



INTRODUCTORY 



13 



atom of it, and in every humblest spirit of it, is abso- 
lutely dependent. Of that dependence it is certain, and 
no study of the method of it can make it less certain."* 
This brings us to the doctrine of the immanence of 
God which is the one ruling conception in present day 
theology. The fact that God is in nature, and in human 
nature, filling it all with his fullness, working out his 
great designs ; that all the natural forces are only meth- 
ods of his working; that all these are parts of his ways; 
that history reveals him; that what we call progress 
is only the carrying forward of his eternal purpose; 
that all the good deeds and the loving services of men 
are the signs of his presence ; that there is, therefore, 
more of God in the world today than there ever was 
before ; that he is nearer to the thought and life of men 
than he ever was before; that we have not to go back 
to past ages to gather proofs of his existence and indi- 
cations of his purpose, but have only to look and listen 
that we may see and hear him, — that we may receive 
his word and walk in his light and share his peace; 
the doctrine of a present God, of an ever-living God, 
of a ministering, guiding, inspiring, comforting, healing, 
helping God, — this is the doctrine which men are be- 
ginning to understand and to lay hold upon. This is 
the truth which underlies Christian Science, albeit it is 
mingled in that system with many exaggerations and 
perversions and moral confusions ; this is the truth which 
has given wings to much of what is known as the New 
Thought, to conceptions of our relation to the spiritual 
world and the infinite Power which are taking a strong 
* "Reconstruction in Theology," p. 89. 



14 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



hold on the minds of millions of men and women in this 
generation. It is the realization of the presence of God 
in our lives — of what Dr. Clarke calls the"Friendhood 
of the Spirit." It is nothing new ; it is all in the Twenty- 
third Psalm and the One Hundred and Twenty-first 
Psalm, and the One Hundred and Thirty-ninth Psalm; 
it is all in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Gospel 
of John, and the First Epistle of John, and in the Sec- 
ond Chapter of First Corinthians and in every other 
utterance of a deep and vital religious experience which 
the Bible contains. But it stands in a very different 
relation to the religious thought of this time from that 
which it occupied in a past generation, and it makes 
necessary some important changes in theological theories. 

The immanence of God is the central truth of the 
present day theology. But it must not be so stated as to 
contradict human freedom, or to identify God with law. 
He is in the whole world, in all the life of man; but he 
is also over it all. He is working in us, but he is not 
coercing us; he is leaving us free to choose the evil and 
the good. His working in us never overbears our 
choices, for it is only the good which we freely choose 
which makes character, and the one thing which he 
wants in this universe is good character, sound and com- 
plete personalities. He is helping us all he can without 
undermining manhood; no more. 

One other element of great importance enters into 
the problem before us. We are all enveloped in and 
more or less possessed by a social consciousness, which is 
the product of human experience, under the guidance of 
the ever present divine influence. We are very fond of 



INTRODUCTORY. 



15 



that beautiful Psalm, "The Lord is My Shepherd," and 
we always give it a personal reference : "My Shep- 
herd." This is a precious faith, but it would be well 
for us to remember that the Good Shepherd is leading 
a flock ; that though he may know by name the individual 
sheep, his care is for the whole flock, and the flock is the 
human race. He is leading Humanity into the green 
pastures and beside the still waters. That is the mean- 
ing of history. He has not yet brought us through all 
our perils, but his wisdom and his patience and his care 
do not fail. And this means that by the good discipline 
of natural law, and by his faithful providence, and by 
the monitions of his Spirit he is gradually leading 
his children into a better understanding of his relation 
to the world and to them, and of their relation to one 
another and to him. If God is leading Humanity, by 
his Spirit, as the shepherd leads his flock, then the 
thoughts of men must be widened with the process of the 
suns; what we call the social consciousness must slowly 
but surely change from generation to generation, and out 
of that purified social consciousness must come better 
thoughts about God, and better explanations of religious 
truth, a new theology, a theology renewed and enlarged 
from age to age. I do not see how any man who be- 
lieves in a living and present God, a God who is dwell- 
ing among his people and educating them by his Spirit, 
can help seeing that theology, which is simply men's ex- 
planation of God's relation to them and to the world, 
must continually change, as their education progresses, 
and as they get clearer and more adequate ideas about 
Him. The notion that theology can be tied up to one 



16 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

set of formulas; that the explanations of religious truth 
which were made one hundred years ago or three hundred 
years ago or fifteen hundred years ago are complete and 
sufficient, needing no revision and no enlargement, seems 
to me a flat and flagrant and even contemptuous denial 
of the one sublime and vital truth of religion, — the fact 
of God's constant presence in the world and of the lead- 
ership of his Spirit in our study of his truth. 

Let us see, for a moment, what are the elements of 
that social consciousness which represents the highest 
thought of the present age. President King of Oberlin 
has given us a most profound discussion of this subject, 
in his book entitled "Theology and the Social Conscious- 
ness." "The simplest," he says, "and probably the most 
accurate single expression we can give to the social con- 
sciousness is to say that it is a growing sense of the real 
brotherhood of men. But five elements seem plainly in- 
volved in this, and may be profitably separated in our 
thought if it is to be clear and definite — a deepening sense 
(1) of the likeness or likemindedness of men; (2) of 
their mutual influence; (3) of the value and sacredness 
of the person; (4) of mutual obligation, and (5) of 
love." 

We shall all admit that these elements are all here, 
in the prevailing thought of the time. 

This age differs from the ages which have pre- 
ceded it in the recognition, first, of the essential likeness 
of men; of the fact that beneath all the differences of 
condition and of endowment, men are just men ; that al- 
though a man may lack culture and wealth and titles 
and rank, "a man's a man for a' that." President King 



INTRODUCTORY 



17 



quotes from Howell's "A Boy's Town," these true words : 
"The first thing you have to learn here below, is that 
in essentials you are just like every one else, and that 
you are different from others only in what is not so much 
worth while." 

The second truth which we are coming to see is that 
of mutual influence; that no man liveth unto himself; 
that we cannot reach perfection or blessedness except as 
we share in the life of our fellows. 

The third is the sacredness of personality; "the 
steadily deepening sense that every person has a value 
not to be measured in anything else and is in himself 
sacred to God and to man." 

The fourth is the growing sense of obligation, our 
duty to help and minister and cooperate. 

The fifth is that the great debt which we owe to 
our fellows is love, — the giving of ourselves for them. 

If now it be true that such is the social conscious- 
ness of this age, — that thoughts like these tend more 
and more to envelope our minds and take possession of 
them; if the mental atmosphere in which we live and 
move is full of such ideas as these, — then it is per- 
fectly certain that our theological conceptions will feel 
their influence. Our thoughts about God will be modi- 
fied by these ideas; our explanations of his relations to 
us will be affected by them. 

If men are essentially alike, it must be because God 
has made them so, and that old theory of his arbitrary 
decrees, of his partial and wilful selection of some to be 
blessed and some to be banned, will have to be given up. 
That theory of foreordination could never have sprung 

2 



18 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY 



out of a social consciousness like that which now pre- 
vails. 

Then, again, that idea of the mutual influence of 
men ; that we are members one of another ; that we share 
one another's woes and burdens, that no man can go to 
heaven alone, — must radically modify all our concep- 
tions of atonement and redemption. We shall be com- 
pelled to abandon the old notion of legal equivalents 
and substitutions and to bring the whole matter into the 
ethical or spiritual realm. 

I cannot stay to illustrate further these effects of 
the social consciousness upon our theological theories; 
other phases of this subject will come to light in the 
lectures which follow. I only desire to fix your thought 
at this time upon this great truth, that the shepherding 
love of the divine Spirit must be leading mankind into 
clearer light and larger life, and that therefore theology 
which is man's explanation of God and his kingdom must 
be constantly changing for the better. 

You may say that the theology is given once for all 
in the Bible. I do not admit the truth of this, but if it 
were true, the case would not be altered in the least ; be- 
cause man's interpretation of the Bible must change as 
man's spiritual vision is enlarged and purified. What 
a man gets out of the Bible depends on the man him- 
self. Cotton Mather, reflecting the Christian conscious- 
ness of his day, gets one thing out of it ; Phillips Brooks, 
reflecting the Christian consciousness of his day gets an- 
other and a very different thing. 

If you say that Christ is the revelation of the truth, 
the same argument applies ; for our interpretation of 



INTRODUCTORY. 19 

Christ changes equally with enlarging vision. It has 
taken long ages of the schooling of the Spirit to bring 
men into o moral and spiritual condition in which they 
could understand and interpret Christ. "The old Pagan 
mind," says Fairbairn, "into which Christianity first 
came, could not possibly be the best interpreter of Chris- 
tianity, and the more the mind is cleansed of the pagan, 
the more qualified it becomes to understand this religion. 
It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that the later forms 
of truth should be the truer and purer." 

I trust I have made it clear what the present day 
theology is. It is the explanation given by the Chris- 
tian consciousness of this time of the truths of Chris- 
tianity. And I hope it is very plain that as the Chris- 
tian consciousness under the leadership and tuition of 
the Spirit of all truth must be constantly clarified and 
invigorated, new statements must continually be made 
of the truths of the Christian religion. 

Not only therefore is there nothing rash or revo- 
lutionary in the assumption that there ought to be, for 
this new time, a new theology, the rational and reverent 
mind should be looking for such a restatement and 
should be ready to receive it. It is precisely as rea- 
sonable to expect it as it is to expect new leaves upon 
the trees in the springtime. The contrary assumption 
is precisely as irrational as would be the claim that the 
plant life which sprung from the earth in the spring of 
the year 1500 is good enough for today. 

It is true that in all development there are constant 
elements, and these must be held fast. Great care is 
needed lest in pruning away the dead wood we sacrifice 



20 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

vital and fruitful branches. A wise conservation must 
always be united with a courageous radicalism. Yet the 
great first truth of all Christian experience is the truth 
of the constant presence of the divine Spirit in the 
world, not only brooding over the earth, as in the morn- 
ing of the creation, and constantly renewing the face of 
the ground, but also shepherding, guiding, teaching his 
children, renewing them in the spirit of their minds, giv- 
ing them larger and truer thoughts, leading them into a 
better understanding of his works and ways. The the- 
ology which is the produot of such leadership must be 
constantly advancing. If we live in the Spirit, says 
Paul, we must walk in the Spirit. We cannot stand still 
in our thinking; we must be going on. The scribe in- 
structed unto the kingdom of heaven must be willing to 
work with God in the ways of service and to walk with 
him in the paths of light. 



II. 

GOD AND MAN. 



"The riddle of the world is understood 
Only by him who feels that God is good, 
As only he can feel who makes his love 
The ladder of his faith, and climbs above 
On the rounds of his best instincts; draws no line 
Between mere human goodness and divine, 
But, judging God by what in him is best, 
With a child's trust, leans on a Father's breast." 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 

(22) 



II. 

GOD AND MAN. 

WE are to speak tonight of God and Man, the 
two great terms of theology and religion. 
Each of these terms has been immeasurably 
expanded in the progress of thought. The history of 
man upon the earth, as we saw in the last lecture, has 
been given a tremendous extension. Humanity, as we 
now know, has descended from an antiquity so dim and 
remote that its records fade utterly from our vision; we 
only know that we are kindred to uncounted billions who 
have inhabited this planet, whose manner of life we can- 
not imagine, into whose consciousness we cannot enter, 
whose discipline and whose destiny is to us unknown. 
In like manner the explorations of science have given to 
our thoughts of God an almost indefinite enlargement. 
The author of such a Universe as that in which we live, 
whose thought is the norm of all its laws, and whose 
life is the life of all its tribes, is a Being before whom 
our souls are humbled because of the greatness of his 
power, and the wonders of his wisdom. The mystery 
of God outreaches our logic and our imagination, and 
the mystery of man is scarcely less sublime. Indeed, as 
Tennyson has told us, the flower in the crannied wall 
holds secrets that baffle our science, and Edwin Markham 
puts a very pertinent question in these lines.: 

(23) 



24 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

"Scoffer, you cry, 'Where is your other world, 
Your fabled heaven in far eternities?' 

Well said; but first, before your lip is curled, 
Tell, ('tis a little thing) where this world is!" 

The man who can accurately locate this planet in 
the universe, and give its true relation to the hosts of 
heaven has knowledge not shared by most of his fellows. 

It is not, however, of these deeper mysteries of being 
that we are to speak tonight. Some things are assumed 
in all our arguments; we assume tonight the being of 
God and of man ; we do not undertake to solve the prob- 
lems connected with the nature of the Creator, or with 
the origin or history of the creature. It is with the rela- 
tion between the two that we are now concerned. 

Their relation has been variously conceived in the 
succeeding ages of human development. There w r as a 
period, far back in the mists of antiquity, when men 
were in the habit of regarding all the unseen powers of 
whom they had some conception as their enemies. The 
ills which they suffered they attributed to their deities; 
to outwit or to baffle or to placate malign forces was 
the larger part of religion. We find this stage of reli- 
gion now existing among the more backward tribes. 
"Savages," says Sir John Lubbock, "almost always regard 
spirits as evil beings. We can, I think, easily under- 
stand why this should be. Amongst the very lowest 
races every other man, — amongst those slightly more 
advanced, every man of a different tribe — is regarded as 
naturally and almost necessarily hostile. A stranger is 
synonymous with an enemy, and a spirit is but a member 
of an invisible tribe. 



GOD AND MAN. 



25 



"The Hottentots, according to Thunberg, have very 
vague ideas about a good deity. They have much clearer 
notions about an evil spirit whom they fear, believing 
him to be the occasion of sickness, death, thunder and 
every calamity that befalls them. The Bechuanas at- 
tribute all evil to an invisible god, whom they call 
Murino. 

"The West Coast negroes, according to Artus, rep- 
resent their deities as black and mischievous, delighting 
to torment them in various ways. They said the Euro- 
pean's God was very good who gave them such blessings 
and treated them like his children. Others asked, mur- 
muring, why God was not as kind to them, why he did 
not supply them with woollen and linen cloth, iron, brass, 
and such things, as well as the Dutch? The Dutch an- 
swered that God had not neglected them since he had 
sent them gold, palm wine, fruits, corn, oxen, goats, 
hens and many other things necessary to life, as tokens 
of his bounty. But there was no persuading them that 
these things came from God. 

"When Burton spoke to the Eastern negroes about 
the Deity they eagerly asked where he was to be found 
in order that they might kill him; for, they said, who 
but he lays waste our homes, and kills our wives and 
cattle?"* 

Browning's Caliban on Setebos gives us this the- 
ology in its next stage of development, when the con- 
ception is a little refined, and God is supposed to be 
possessed of great power which he uses capriciously. So 
this uncanny savage Caliban lies splashing "in the cool 

* "Origin of Civilization," Chap. IV. 



26 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



slush," looking away to the sea and musing about the 
deity of whom his dam has taught him. 

"Setebos, Setebos and Setebos ! 
Thinketh he dwelleth in the cold of the moon. 
Thinketh he made it, with the sun to match, 
But not the stars, the stars came otherwise, 
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that, 
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, 
And snaky sea, which rounds and ends the same. 

Thinketh he made thereat the sun, the isle, 

Men and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. 

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; 

Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, 

That floats and feeds ; a certain badger brown 

He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye 

By moonlight : and the pie with the long tongue 

That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, 

And says a plain word when she finds her prize, 

But will not eat the ants : the ants themselves 

That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks 

About their hole — He made all these and more, 

Made all we see, and us, in spite; how else? 

He could not Himself, make a second self 

To be his mate; as well have made Himself; 

He would, not make what he mislikes or slights, 

An eye-sore to him, or not worth his pains ; 

But did, in envy, listlessness or sport 

Make what himself would fain in a manner be, — 

Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, 

Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while, 

Things he admires and mocks, too — that is it. 

* * * 

Put case, unable to be what I wish, 
I yet could make a live bird out of clay; 



GOD AND MAN. 27 

Would I not take clay, pinch my Caliban 

Able to fly, — for, there, see, he hath wings, 

And great comb, like the hoopoe's to admire, 

And there, a sting to do his foes offense. 

There and I will that he begin to live, 

Fly to yon rock-top, rip me off the horns 

Of grigs high up that make the merry din, 

Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not. 

In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, 

And he lay stupid-like — why, I should laugh; 

And if he, spying me, should fall to weep, 

Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, 

Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again, 

Well, as the chance were, this might take or else 

Not take my fancy; I might hear his cry, 

And give the manikin three sound legs for one, 

Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg, 

And lessoned he was mine and merely clay. 

Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme, 

Drinking the mash, with brain become alive, 

Making and marring clay at will? So He!" 

Traces — survivals, perhaps we may call them — 
of this natural theology of Caliban which deifies a ca- 
pricious power and worships it with a sort of slavish 
fear, may be found in conceptions of God that are not 
yet very old. 

Out of this arises the larger and higher conception 
of God as a moral ruler, whose nature is holy and whose 
law is righteous, who governs the world in the interests 
of justice and purity and truth, who is capable of affec- 
tion toward his obedient creatures, — whose deepest mo- 
tive, perhaps, is love, but whose primary relation to men 
is that of a Ruler, a Sovereign. This is the constructive 
idea by which our Reformed theology has been built for 



28 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

the last three hundred years. Its ruling conceptions have 
been political or forensic. In trying to explain the rela- 
tion of God to men, it has depended mostly on govern- 
mental analogies. What God would or would not do 
for man was determined, primarily, by governmental 
considerations. His personal feelings, if we may so speak, 
were subordinated to his obligations to preserve and 
maintain a righteous government. And man's approach 
to him must always be through the legal provisions made 
for the maintenance of the honor of his government. 

This is true of the Calvinistic system, and of the 
systems affiliated with it, and it is not less true of the 
Arminian theory; for though the Arminians made 
more account of benevolent motives in the divine govern- 
ment than the Calvinists did, the governmental relation 
was after all the dominant one. The Calvinist, says 
Fairbairn, held the sovereignty to be absolute and irre- 
sponsible, and the Arminian held it to be tempered by 
benevolence, but to both the government of God was the 
primary concern. Calvin maintained that the will of 
God — his mere good pleasure — was the source of it all; 
that you must not look behind that will for any sort of 
motive. No injustice can be imputed to him, because 
his will makes justice. If he elects some it is not that 
they merit anything; if he reprobates others, it is not 
because they particularly deserve it, it is because he 
chooses to do it. He is free from blame in all this, says 
Calvin, like a creditor who has the power to remit his 
claim against one debtor and to enforce it it against 
another. As Caliban would say: 



GOD AND MAN. 29 

"Thinketh such shows nor right nor wrong in him, 
Nor hard nor cruel* He is strong and lord. 
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs 
That march now from the mountain to the sea: 
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, 
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 
Say the first straggler that boasts purple spots 
Shall join the file one pincer twisted off; 
Say this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, 
And two worms he whose nippers end in red. 
As it likes me, each time, I do; so He." 

This absolute arbitrariness was much modified by 
the later Calvinists, and the Arminians; motives of ben- 
evolence were supposed to control the divine government ; 
it was believed to be a moral government, but the prin- 
ciples on which it was administered were such as control 
the administration of human government. As Fairbairn 
says, after an analysis of the idea of Sovereignty, Ar- 
minian as well as Calvinistic, prevailing after the Refor- 
mation: "Theories of the divine Sovereignty had the 
strictest relation to ancient theories as to the forms of 
government, or the duties and rights of citizens, and the 
grounds and limits of the legal power. This means that 
to the forensic theologian as was the state, such was the 
universe and the reign of God." 

Now, so far as the relations of God and man are 
concerned, what has happened to the old theology, what 
has transformed it into the new theology is simply this, 
that the ruling conception of God as Sovereign, Ruler, 
Moral Governor, has been exchanged for the ruling con- 
ception of God as Father. This does not mean that the 
real sovereignty or rulership of God has been denied, 



30 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



but that it is no longer the primary idea in our personal 
relation with God. Sovereignty was the fundamental 
idea of the old theology; it admitted as much Father- 
hood in it as could be reconciled with absolute sov- 
ereignty; no more. Fatherhood is the fundamental 
idea of the new theology; and the sovereignty has to be 
interpreted through the Fatherhood. The theology 
which says, first of all, God is Ruler and man is subject, 
is the old theology; the theology which says, first of 
all, God is Father and man is his child, is the new the- 
ology. 

Dr. Fairbairn, in his volume on "The Place of Christ 
in Modern Theology," quotes from a volume of Dr. 
Candlish, the distinguished Scotch theologian, a clear 
and consistent statement of the old theology, which made 
sovereignty central and primary. Let me cite Fairbairn's 
resume of Candlish : 

1. " 'God's fundamental and primary' relation to 
man was that of Creator and Governor; 'His rule and 
government must be in the proper forensic sense legal 
and judicial;' 'absolute and sovereign;' 'of the most 
thoroughly royal, imperial, autocratic kind." To con- 
ceive it as anything else were 'an inconsistency, an in- 
tolerable anomaly, a suicidal self-contradiction.' 

"2. [Jesus Christ is] the only historical Person who 
was really and by nature the Son of God. 

"3. The only other sons of God were the elect in 
Christ, who became by adoption partakers in the Son- 
ship of the Only Begotten. Beyond these limits there 
was no Fatherhood, only sovereignty" * 

*Op. cit. p. 432. 



GOD AND MAN. 



31 



The idea was that the sin of Adam canceled the 
fact of fatherhood; that Adam and all his descendants 
ceased to be the sons of God and became the subjects of 
his government, justly exposed to the penalties of dis- 
obeyed law. Provision was made, however, in the atone- 
ment, for restoration to the filial condition of these alien- 
ated subjects; and all who accepted Christ as their sub- 
stitute and received his saving grace were adopted into 
the family of God; to them he became once more a 
Father and they were acknowledged as his children; but 
all the rest who failed to avail themselves of this pro- 
vision were aliens and strangers, subjects of his law, 
indeed, but in no wise sharers of his parental love. 

This is the conception which is fundamental in the 
theology which was taught in all our Evangelical 
churches when some of us were young, and which is still 
taught in a great many churches. But there are now not 
a few of the leading churches of all denominations in 
which it is no longer taught ; in which it has either been 
explicitly abandoned or implicitly supplanted by other 
conceptions. 

There are two main reasons for this change. The 
first is that a fuller study of the words of Jesus Christ 
make it plain that this doctrine utterly misrepresents his 
teaching respecting men's relation to God; and the sec- 
ond is that the social consciousness of this generation 
finds it impossible to entertain such an idea of God as 
this theory implies. That the Creator of the universe 
should hold such a relation as this toward the thousands 
of millions of sentient creatures for whose existence he 
is responsible, excluding them from their birth from his 



82 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

fatherly love and care, counting them as subjects, not 
sons, and as aliens and enemies until their broken legal 
relation to his kingdom has been repaired — a fracture 
in which they had no part whatever — is, to the moral 
sense of enlightened humanity in this generation a prop- 
osition utterly unbelievable. 

More and more clear it has become as men have re- 
flected upon the relation between themselves and God 
that the teachings of Jesus respecting the universal 
Fatherhood of God must be true ; that the parable of the 
Prodigal Son must give us the right view of God's rela- 
tion to all his children; that there are and can be no 
legal or political or governmental barriers shutting any 
human being out of God's fatherly love; that the fact 
of Fatherhood cannot be canceled by the disobedience of 
the child; that the true father never disowns his chil- 
dren because of their unworthiness, but always counts 
them as his, even when they are in the far country, and 
always keeps the door unlatched and the light in the 
window waiting for their return. 

In short, it has become increasingly clear to reverent 
and earnest men that the central relation of God to men 
must be an ethical or a spiritual, rather than a political 
relation. The great fact about him which we most need 
to know is not that he is our Ruler or Governor, but 
that he is our Father. To put the legal or forensic fact 
first, and make the parental and filial relation a possi- 
bility only, is to profane all our thoughts of God. 

All attempts to explain the relation of God to man 
in governmental terms are therefore inadequate and mis- 
leading. They obscure the great fact; they do not get 



GOD AND MAN. 



33 



at the heart of the matter at all. "Spiritual and per- 
sonal relations," says Fairbairn, "which have their causes 
and ends in spiritual and personal needs, cannot be 
stated in the terms of physical creation or political insti- 
tution, but only in those ef the heart and the life"* 
That is the fact which the new theology has discovered 
and on which it has builded. Fairbairn is right when he 
goes on to say, that Jesus "makes the Fatherhood the 
basis of all the duties which man owes to God. Su- 
preme love to God is possible only because God is love. 
On the ground of mere sovereignty or judicial and auto- 
cratic authority the first commandment could never be 
enjoined. We cannot love simply because we will or 
wish or are commanded, but only because we are loved. 
Supreme affection is possible only through the sovereign 
Fatherhood. And what is true of this first is true of all 
our other duties. Worship is to be in spirit and in truth 
because it is worship of the Father. Prayer is to be 
constant and simple and sincere because it is offered to 
the Father. We are to give alms in simplicity and with- 
out ostentation because the Father sees in secret. We 
are to be forgiving, because the Father forgives. Obe- 
dience is imitation of God, a being perfect as our Father 
in heaven is perfect. In a word, duty is but the habit 
of the filial spirit; and it is possible and incumbent on 
all men, because all are sons/"f 

Let me take a little time to verify this statement. 
Dr. Wm. Adams Brown of Union, is perhaps the most 



* "The place of Christ in Modern Theology," p. 445. 
t Ibid, p. 448. 

3 



O* PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

eminent professor of theology in the Presbyterian church. 
These are his words: 

"We have a better understanding of the Gospel of 
Jesus, the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, 
the worth of the individual human soul, greatness 
through service, salvation through sacrifice, the Kingdom 
of God as the goal of humanity — these truths, so in- 
exhaustible in their richness and freshness, are seen to 
be his peculiar contribution to the religious thought of 
the race." * 

Professor George B. Stevens of Yale, was one of 
our strongest Congregational teachers. He said: 

"For [Jesus] the term Father best expresses God's 
nature and relation to men. ... As applied to God 
it carries with it all the meaning which the human anal- 
ogy is adapted to suggest." t 

Dr. William Newton Clarke, not long ago taken 
to his rest, was the first of the Baptist leaders of the- 
ology. "In the doctrine of the personal Fatherhood of 
God," he says, "lay the exceptional power of Jesus' teach- 
ing. He set it forth most vividly in the parable of the 
Prodigal Son — or rather of the True Father; and in 
the Sermon on the Mount he made it the foundation of 
right living for members of his kingdom. No student 
should fail to study the Fatherhood of God in the Ser- 
mon on the Mount." $ 

President King of Oberlin, is a master in theology. 
This is his testimony: "Christ's conception of God as 

*"The Essence of Christianity" p. 299. 

f "The Christian Doctrine of Salvation," p. 264. 

$"An Outline of Christian Doctrine," p. 268. 



GOD AND MAN. 



35 



Father must be taken as the really ruling conception, de- 
termining all else in theology." * 

Such is the explanation which the new theology 
gives of God's relation to men. It is not, really, very 
new ; it is just as new as the Sermon on the Mount and 
the parable of the Prodigal Son, no newer. It is the 
precise and simple truth which Jesus taught about the 
Father, unburdened of the fictions of mediaeval political 
science. 

Some may be thinking that if the doctrine of Father- 
hood thus supplants the doctrine of sovereignty, no 
foundations will be left for the maintenance of justice, 
for the upholding of God's rectoral honor, for the punish- 
ment of sin. That is an apprehension which widely pre- 
vails, and men are often heard charging that the new 
theology has abolished all the sanctions of law and has 
no terrors or warnings for transgressors. I trust that 
we shall be able to see, before this course of lectures is 
finished, that this is very far from being true. The new 
theology does not blind the facts of life, and the facts 
of retribution are too palpable to be ignored. The doc- 
trine of the Fatherhood has to be interpreted in connec- 
tion with an order of nature in which we all live, and 
in which sin is punished with a severity and a certainty 
which the old theology never began to conceive. Of all 
this we shall have more to say at another time. 

But to-night I wish that we might take home to our- 
selves this one thought that God is our Father and that 
we are his children. Our Father — the Father of us all ! 
I suppose that the Lord's Prayer is a prayer which every 
* "Reconstruction in Theology," p. 189. 



OO PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

human being ought to pray every day; that it ex- 
presses the truth which every human being ought to rec- 
ognize. "Our Father." He is the Father not only of 
patriarchs and prophets, of saints and martyrs, of the 
holy and excellent of the earth, he is the Father of pub- 
licans and sinners, of heathen men and criminals, of the 
vilest and the worst, just as truly as of the purest and 
the best. It is the one word that we have to speak to all 
sorts and conditions of men — the one message which 
every messenger of God has to deliver, — "God is your 
Father, you are all his children !" That was what Jesus 
told them all; it is the gospel which he has commis- 
sioned us to speak. If you are down in the depths of 
degradation and misery, laden with the sense of guilt 
and shame, humiliated by many failures to free your- 
self from the bonds of evil habit, hopeless about your 
own condition, — to you, even to you, I have no other 
word than that God is your Father and that you are 
his child. It is his nature that you have inherited and 
that you are soiling and crippling and abusing in your 
sin. You will never be so much ashamed of yourself 
as you ought to be until this truth has somehow been 
brought home to you. What right have you to be where 
you are, being what you are? What right have you to 
permit a God-given nature, faculties so royal, capabil- 
ities so godlike, to become so degraded? And there is 
no excuse for it. Heredity is no excuse. Heredity! 
Your heredity is from God. He is your Father. 
Deeper than all other strains of ancestral tendency is 
tlds fact that your nature comes from God. That is 



GOD AND MAN. 



37 



the one fact that must never be blurred in all your think- 
ing. 

Environment is no excuse for you. Environment! 
God is the great first fact in all your environment, no 
matter where you may be. There is no place of temp- 
tation in which he is not nearer to you than any human 
influence can be. His help, his strength, his protective 
power have been round about you every minute of your 
life. All you had to do at any instant was to open 
your thought and your desire to him, and he would 
come in and deliver you from the evil. 

No, there is no excuse. A son of God, with the 
infinite love always encompassing him, with all the 
powers of the omnipotent pledged to him, has no need 
to be a brute or a fool or a coward or a weakling; he 
ought to be a man; that is what it means to be a son 
of God. He can be, if he wants to be. Let him not 
palliate his fault. Let him repent of it, and lay hold 
on the grace that can save him, and prove his birthright. 

Perhaps you are saying, "If God is my Father I 
shall surely be rescued from this pit, by and by, no 
matter what I may do; he will save me in spite of 
myself." No : he will not do that, just because he is 
your Father. The one thing that every wise father 
respects is his child's personality. He will not over- 
bear or coerce his choices, in the highest things. If our 
heavenly Father were a despot he might compel us to 
obey; he could not compel us to love. He is not a 
despot; he is a Father; he wants our love, and he 
will wait until we freely give it to him. He will let 



38 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



us suffer; yea, he will suffer with us, but he will not 
try to coerce our love. The father's true attitude is 
expressed by one writer thus: "We are not to say 
'I will conquer that child, no matter what it may cost 
him,' but we are to say 'I will help that child to con- 
quer himself, no matter what it may cost me.' " * That 
is what fatherhood means. That is what God's Father- 
hood means. You have made him suffer a great deal 
already; how much more suffering are you going to 
cause him, by your disobedience and ingratitude? 

"A suffering God!" some one is exclaiming: "is 
not that a heresy?" I dare say it is, but as President 
King says "we must unhestitatingly admit that without 
which God can be no real God to us." 

"Theology has no falser idea," says Fairbairn, "than 
that of the impassibility of God. If he is capable of 
sorrow he is capable of suffering, and were he without 
the capacity for either he would be without any feeling 
of the evil of sin or the misery of man. The very 
truth that comes by Jesus Christ may be said to be 
summed up in the passibility of God." f And President 
King goes on: "Certainly with the increasingly clear 
vision which the social consciousness is giving us, of 
sympathetic, unselfish, definitely self-sacrificing, loving 
leadership even among men, we shall not rest satisfied 
with less in God. We must have a suffering, seeking, 
loving God; because our Father, suffering in our sin, 
bearing as a burden the sin of each, and not satisfied 

* Quoted in King's 'Theology and the Social Conscious- 
ness," p. 110. 

f'The Place of Christ in Modern Theology,"' p. 483. 



GOD AND MAN. ©y 

while one turns away; no mere on-looker, but in all 
our afflictions, himself afflicted. The cross of Christ, 
then, is only an honest showing of the actual facts of 
God's seeking, suffering love."* 

That is what God's Fatherhood means, and it is a 
mighty meaning, if the world can only be brought to 
understand it. No other truth has such power to make 
evil doers Ashamed of their evil-doings, to convince 
them of sin, to call them back to the ways of righteous- 
ness. There is an evangelistic power in it, if it can be 
preached with conviction, which no other doctrine pos- 
sesses. It was the one message of Phillips Brooks; he 
had only one sermon, as he said; especially in his best 
years it was all an impassioned appeal to men to recog- 
nize their sonship with God, and live in the light and 
the joy and the power of it. Something like this he 
was always saying: "If Christ can make you know 
yourself; if as you walk with him day by day he can 
reveal to you your sonship to the Father : if, keeping 
company with him, you can come more and more to 
know how native is goodness and how unnatural is 
sin to the soul of man; if, dwelling with Him who 
is both God and man you can come to believe both in 
God and in man through him, then you are saved, — 
saved from contempt, saved from despair, saved with 
courage and hope and charity and the power to resist 
temptation and the passionate pursuit of perfection." f 

This was the word that thrilled and swayed the 
vast audiences of Wall street brokers at the Lenten 



* "Theology and the Social Consciousness," p. 221, 
f 'The Light of the World," p. 22, 



40 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

noon days, — that sent men out into the street with 
faces blanched and knees trembling under them be- 
cause a new vision had come to them of the meaning 
of life. 

O that God would help all of us, his ministers, to 
make men see this one fact of their relation to him; to 
make them feel all the honor of it, and all the shame 
of it; to make them realize the misery and the guilt 
and the folly of the Prodigal's condition, and so to say, 
"I will arise and go unto my Father." 



III. 

NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 

(41) 



"We pray no more, made lowly wise, 
For miracle and sign ; 
Anoint our eyes to see within 
The common, the divine. 

"We turn from seeking thee afar 
And in unwonted ways, 
To build from out our daily lives 
The temples of thy praise. 

"And if thy casual comings, Lord, 
To hearts of old were dear, 
What joy shall dwell within the faith 
That finds thee ever near! 

"And nobler yet shall duty grow, 

And more shall worship be, 
When thou art found in all our life, 
And all our life in thee." 

Frederick L. Hosmer. 



42) 



III. 

NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 

WE are to study this evening the relations of na- 
ture and the supernatural. The changes 
which the new theology has made in our 
definitions of these terms are as important as any which 
we shall have to consider. 

The relation between nature and the supernatural, 
as the old theology conceived it, was one of contrast. 
The supernatural was the anti-natural — what was con- 
trary to nature. Indeed, it is generally true that the 
old theology was based on contrasts; in its theories 
it was essentially dualistic : God and man were con- 
trasted natures ; the human was not only morally but 
metaphysically the opposite of the divine; grace was the 
antithesis of law; justice the reverse of mercy; heaven 
the antipode of earth. The new theology is largely a 
process of unification ; it carries on the kind of work 
which the Psalmist celebrated when he sang : 

"Mercy and truth are met together, 
Righteousness and peace have kissed each other." 

The principle of reason is the principle of unity; it 
brings together and reconciles differences and contrari- 
eties ; it shows how things which were formerly regarded 
as hostile and contradictory are included in a larger 
truth. And this is the work which has been done for 

(43) 



44 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



theology in the enlargement of human knowledge. Na- 
ture and the supernatural are no longer conceived to be 
opposite poles of thought, they are seen to be insep- 
arably related; different sides of the same phenomena. 

The old conception was that the supernatural ap- 
peared in the world for the purpose of interrupting or 
violating the order of nature ; that was its mission, 
that was its justification; unless in some way breaches 
could be made in the natural order, unless it could be 
demonstrated that there was a Power strong enough to 
break in upon the uniformities of natural law and set 
them aside, there would, it was argued, be no adequate 
reason for believing in the existence of God. Miracles 
were defined as such interferences with the natural order, 
and were defended as proofs of the truth of revelation. 
"Do we believe," asks Dr. Mark Hopkins "with our 
best philosophers, either that the laws of nature are 
only the stated mode in which God operates, or that all 
nature, with all its laws, is perfectly under his control? 
Then we can find no difficulty in believing that such 
a God may, at any time when the good of his creatures 
requires it, change the mode of his operation, and sus- 
pend those laws." 

It is true, indeed, that we cannot deny to God 
this power, but with our present habits of thinking we 
might find it difficult to believe that if he had this power 
he would exercise it. Our modern ways of looking at 
things make us suppose that the uniformity of natural 
law expresses most clearly not only the truth and power 
but also the beneficence of God; and variations from 
this uniformity are therefore rather a burden than a 



Mature and the supernatural. 45 

help to our faith in his goodness. This is the real dif- 
ficulty which thoughtful men find at the present day, 
with the old theory of miracles. They see in the regu- 
larity and invariability of natural causes wonderful evi- 
dences of the fidelity and the goodness of the Creator; 
to tell them that God comes into this order now and 
then and suspends its operations or sets it aside, does 
not confirm their faith in him, but rather tends to 
weaken it. 

If any unusual event should take place, or should 
be reported as having taken place, thoughtful men of 
this generation would not ,therefore deny that it could 
have taken place; they would carefully examine the 
evidence for it, and if this evidence seemed conclusive 
their inference would be, not that this unusual event was 
the result of the violation or interruption by the Crea- 
tor of the laws of nature, but that it was rather the 
working out of some law not yet discovered, some deeper 
and diviner principle of life whose operation is yet to be 
revealed. Many things have happened, within the life- 
time even of those who are not yet old, which were very 
marvelous. If they had been predicted beforehand 
we should undoubtedly have pronounced them violations 
of law, — miracles, and therefore impossible, since the 
day of miracles, we are always saying, is past. If we 
had been told forty years ago that we might be able to 
converse freely with friends a thousand miles away, 
hearing their speech distinctly, and recognizing their 
voices, we should have ridiculed the suggestion as the 
vagary of some visionary brain. With all the laws of 
sound we knew at that time this seemed utterly at vari- 



46 



PRESENT DAY THEQLOGV. 



ance. If we had been told twenty years ago that we 
should be able to penetrate with our sight a pine board 
an inch thick, and discern objects on the other side of 
it, we should have hooted at that as a glaring denial 
of the most indubitable laws of optics. Nothing re- 
corded in the New Testament is more contrary to uni- 
versal human experience than were the phenomena of 
the telephone and the Roentgen rays when they first 
appeared. How many more laws of nature there may 
be whose existence is yet unknown to us no man can 
predict. And it may be that wonderful events which 
have taken place in the past, have followed certain lines 
of natural causation whose nature and operation are yet 
unknown to us, but which we shall better understand in 
future days. 

"The religious interest in miracles," says President 
King "is essentially the same as that involved in any 
ideal view of the world. The insistence on miracle for 
the religious man means the insistence on a living God, 
and the insistence that, though mechanism is absolutely 
universal in extent, nevertheless, as Lotze says, 'it is 
completely subordinate in significance.' We are not 
to make a god of mechanism, it declares, nor put mech- 
anism above God. The universality of law, therefore, 
is to theology only the perfect consistency in the modes 
of activity of God in carrying out his immutable pur- 
pose of love. Hence God will always act according to 
law, — that is, in perfect consistency with his unchang- 
ing law of love; but his action may or may not always 
be formulable under any of the laws of nature known 
to us. 



NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 47 

"The religious world, this means, cannot be con- 
tent with special acts of love here and there; it must 
know that all the action of God rests on love. Just as 
in the modification of the design argument by evolution, 
we replace various smaller designs testifying to intelli- 
gence by one all-embracing design, so do we here replace 
the many miracles testifying to love by the one great 
miracle that an infinite purpose of love is the source 
of all : 'All's love yet all's law.' That is, the religious 
view must hold that the so-called 'departures from the 
uniformity of nature' are themselves according to law, 
called out by the same consistency of the loving purpose 
of God. as the so-called uniformity. Rare phenomena 
are not lawless."* 

Such is the attitude of the new theology toward 
those events which are described as miraculous. To 
maintain that such events — which are simply unusual 
events — could not occur is, it insists, utterly unscien- 
tific; science does not dogmatize in any such way as 
that : to describe them as violations of natural law is, 
on the other hand, irrational ; we have no good rea- 
son for believing that natural law is violated; the 
only reasonable account that can be given of them, if 
they can be proved to have occurred, is that they be- 
long in the natural order; that they are parts of God's 
ways which we have not yet learned to trace. 

Of course all this involves a relation of God to 
the world far more intimate and vital than that with 
which the old theology made us familiar. It implies 
that all natural law is in its origin and in the power 

* "Reconstruction in Theology," pp. 61, 62. 



48 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

which it reveals essentially supernatural ; that there 
is a supernatural side to nature; that it is all a mani- 
festations, in orderly ways, of the wisdom and the will 
of God. It is not in special providences and abnormal 
instances of intervention that we are to look for God, 
it is in the whole movement of nature. In every natural 
process, in the vital warmth of the sun, in the breath- 
ing of the winds, in the germination and bloom and 
fruitage of the plants, in the marvels that are wrought 
in the cells of which all living tissue is composed, in 
the beating of our own hearts we discern his presence; 
he is the Power behind all law, he is the Life of all life ; 
he is in all and over all and through all. 

In my childhood and youth any unusual appear- 
ance of the sky startled and alarmed me; I had learned 
to look for God only in phenomena that were unusual; 
such an exceptional appearance might be a sign of his 
presence. I can well remember the dread which filled 
my soul one hazy autumn afternoon when I was work- 
ing by myself in a lonely field, because the sky took 
on an aspect which I had never before seen it wearing. 
About the same time, perhaps a little earlier, a most 
brilliant comet appeared in the heavens, and that, too, 
because it was unusual, was felt by many to be a por- 
tent, — a sign of the presence of God in the world. I 
have not forgotten how I was wont to bury my head in 
the coverlid when I went to bed at night because the 
tail of that comet could be seen through the window 
near the foot of my bed. My fear was the natural re- 
flection of the ideas concerning God which were then 
prevalent; others about me no doubt to some extent 



NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 



49 



shared this terror; if some of them did not share it 
it was because they were more stolid or less imaginative. 
So we find as we go back for a century or two that 
unusual natural phenomena of any kind were sure to 
be regarded as the signs of God's presence, — hurri- 
canes, thunderstorms, high tides, pestilences — any ab- 
normal event > — anything ; out of the ordinary course 
of nature, was likely to be interpreted by the most de- 
vout persons as an evidence that God had come into 
his world. All this was the natural inference from the 
theory that God reveals himself through interruptions 
of the natural order, through suspensions or violations 
of the laws of nature. The entire movement of modern 
thought as it has grappled with the great problems of 
life has led us away from this notion to the conclu- 
sion that the wisdom and goodness of God are revealed 
not in violations of the natural order but in its continu- 
i»y and uniformity. What men once regarded as signs 
of God's presence and power we should now feel to be 
evidences of his weakness and caprice. An exceptionally 
dark day is not so clear a proof to us of God's presence 
as an ordinarily bright day is; a comet gives us not 
so good reason for believing in him as does the sun 
traveling in the greatness of his strength, or Orion and 
the Pleiades, keeping their nightly watch above our heads. 
The comet is not so good a witness for God as are the 
neighbor planets or the steadfast stars, because it is so 
infrequent a visitor, and because the nature of its move- 
ments and the laws of its being are not so well known. 
Nevertheless the comets themselves do witness for him, 
4 



50 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

for, as we now know, they are under law; their orbits 
have been measured and their years computed. They 
witness for him now not because they are lawless and 
vagarious, but because they are known to be no less 
obedient to law than are the planets or the fixed stars. 

If, then, we mean by miracles violations of the laws 
of nature, we shall have to say that the new theology 
does not believe in miracles; but if we mean by mir- 
acles, evidences of the presence of God in his world, 
the new thology teaches that nature is all miraculous 
from center to circumference, since there is no part of 
it in which he is not always present and at work. It is 
not in occasional invasions or incursions into the domain 
of natural law that he makes himself known, it is in the 
entire operation of nature. 

For Nature, as we have found, cannot be inter- 
preted at all unless you bring to it conceptions which are 
entirely above and apart from the mere mechanical con- 
nection with which science is often satisfied. Nature is 
intelligible only to intelligence. It has no meaning 
until a Mind is there to interpret it. 

Take all the multiform and marvellous phenomena 
of what we know as color — the color of clouds and 
skies, of leaves and blossoms, of rocks and earth, of 
gems and plumage — where is it? What is it? Does 
it belong to these natural objects themselves? Certainly 
not. It exists only in the vision of the man that per- 
ceives it. The blind man sees no color ; the color- 
blind man does not see it as it is. "Color," says Fair- 
bairn "does not inhere in things ; Nature by herself 
if without it. It is there because man is there, possessed 



NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 51 

of the sense by which it is not simply perceived, but, as 
it were, constituted."* 

Precisely so with regard to sound. There is no 
sound where there is no ear to hear it. There are vi- 
brations of the air which are calculated to produce 
sound, but what we mean by sound is simply the im- 
pression made by these vibrations upon the ear that is 
fitted to receive them, an impression noted by the mind. 
There is no music until the man is there to listen to it. 

"And we could go on," says Fairbairn "from sense 
to sense, from ear and eye to taste and smell, and by 
analysis enlarge and confirm the conclusion that the 
qualities which our senses perceive are not things merely 
of external nature; but that either they could not be 
or could not seem to be without the constitutive faculty 
or the interpretative personalty of man. In other words, 
nature in her own right is, if not a void, yet at most a 
mere aggregate of mechanical properties ; her pomp and 
beauty, her voice and all her harmonies she owes to 
Mind. We receive from her what we have given to her, 
and without us she would not be what she is." f 

Carrying the argument forward, the same writer 
argues, that we only know of the existence of Energy 
in the world outside through the action of our own wills. 
It is by putting forth power and overcoming resistance 
that we learn what power is. We therefore only know 
causation because we are ourselves causes. "A world of 
necessitated beings could not form or conceive the no- 
tion of energy;" it is only because we are personalities 

* "The Philosophy of the Christian Religion," p. 31, 
f Ibid, p. 33. 



52 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

with free will, that we know what it is. Thus this 
great category of energy which underlies all science is 
essentially a spiritual conception. We see how it is that 
all which gives significance or intelligibility to physical 
nature is the free intelligence of man. I am condensing 
for you Fairbairn's argument here, and you will be glad 
to have me go on with him a little further: 

"Since the intellect can interpret Nature, Nature 
is intelligible. Since Nature is intelligible there must 
be some correlation between its laws or methods and the 
rational processes in us; since there is this correlation 
between the intelligible w r orld and the interpretative in- 
tellect they must embody one and the same intelligence. 
.... But this argument admits a further development. 
The human intellect could not live unless embosomed 
by a universe which was in its constitution and contents 
as rational as itself. Reason could not live in a w T orld 
where no reason was. If the world became mad, if its 
physical forces were now conserved and now destroyed; 
if continuity governed one day and accident the next; 
if gravitation now ruled and all rivers flowed to the sea 
and all lighter bodies fell toward the heavier; if again 
levitation reigned, and the sea turned itself into the 
rivers and rose above the mountains and the heavier 
bodies flew away from the lighter; what would the effect 
of this mad world be on this sane mind? Could mind 
in its presence maintain its sanity? . . . And does 
not this signify that we must have the correlation of the 
intellect and the intelligible before we can have either 
a rational mankind or any science of nature? But it 
signifies one thing more, viz. : that the Intelligence 



NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 



63 



which is embodied in this intelligible Nature is in kind 
and quality one with the intelligence embodied in its 
interpreter. The Reason that lives in Nature speaks a 
language that the reason personalized in man can un- 
derstand and translate." * 

The intelligence which is embodied in this intelli- 
gible Nature is God. He is immanent in nature. He 
fills every part of it with his presence ; he reveals him- 
self in every natural force, in every movement and pro- 
cess. And when we take Nature as including him, and 
expressing his thoughts and revealing him, then, as Fair- 
bairn says, "the distinction between the natural and the 
supernatural ceases, or becomes thoroughly unreal. For 
the supernatural, as commonly taken, denotes a cause or 
will outside as well as above Nature, opposed to it and 
supersessive of its laws; but here it denotes a cause 
which is as native to nature as reason or thought is to 
man. Withdraw or paralyze the cause, and Nature as 
its effect ceases; i. e., without the supernatural the nat- 
ural can neither begin nor continue to be." 

I trust that this discussion may have brought home 
to you the conviction that the new theology does not dis- 
pense with God, or banish him from his universe; that 
it brings him a great deal nearer to us than that old 
deistic conception did, which represented him as having 
contrived and set up a system of natural laws, and left 
them to work out his designs, only coming in, once in 
a while, by some miraculous intervention, to show us that 
he had power over the machinery. Nature, according to 
that conception, was a vast piece of mechanism, cun- 
* Ibid, pp. 33-37 f 



54 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



ningly contrived, and exhibiting in its construction the 
divine wisdom and power ; and God, as Carlyle says, was 
conceived of as sitting on the outside of it and seeing it 
go. There was really very little of God in that world 
which the theories of a past generation presented to our 
thought. We have got rid of that godless mechanism. 
We have found, in the words of Mr. Pike, that "all 
things exist as part of the process of his revealing; and 
every spirit of man, every flower, every atom of matter, 
is an open door into the presence of a God at hand and 
not afar off. At the same time * * * though the 
totality of phenomena arises from God's passing into 
activity it does not exhaust him. The whole of God is 
never disclosed. That only is true monotheism, trans- 
cending every deistic and pantheistic limitation alike, 
which contemplates God as neither absorbed in the uni- 
verse nor excluded from it, but consciously comprehend- 
ing the whole within himself as the unfolding of his 
own thoughts and energies. Modern science catches up 
the ancient strain of Hildebert's hymn and sings of God 
as 

'Above all things, below all things; 

Around all things, within all things; 

Within all, but not shut in; 

Around all, but not shut out; 

Above all, as the Ruler : 

Below all, as the Sustainer; 

Around all as all-embracing Protection, 

Within all, as the fullness of life.' " 

There are two sides to this truth of the immanence 
of God, both of which are full of wonder and signifi- 

* "The Divine Drama," p. 5. 



NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 



55 



cance, but which we need to distinguish in our thought. 
The first is his presence in Nature, the second is his 
presence in our spiritual lives. In Nature his Power 
and his Reason are revealed, in our lives he makes known 
his Goodness and his Love. 

His marvelous nearness to us in the world about us 
is a truth, when we begin to grasp it, which fills us with 
awe. This wonderful universe by whose might and 
majesty we are surrounded, in whose bosom we are cra- 
dled, by whose life we are nourished, is only the visible 
manifestation to us of God. 

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit, 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there ; 

If I make my bed in Sheol thou art there; 

If I take the wings of the morning 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 

Even there shall thy hand lead me 

And thy right hand shall hold me." 

So sang the old Psalmist. Listen now to a seer of 
the twentieth century: 

"When we picture man standing upon the earth, 
and the earth flying at a thousand-mile-a-minute rate 
through space, circling in unbroken obedience round the 
sun; and then when we picture sun, earth and man as 
enveloped by the Universe, we are beginning to make 
real to ourselves the actual truth and fact of things. As 
we see the sky arch over us and sweep round our world, 
so we see the vaster universal heaven sweep round and 
ensphere our solar system. We are held, sphere within 
sphere, the less enfolded in the greater out to the great- 



56 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



est. We are ensphered by the Universe. * * * Within 
this universal sphere we have our existence, think our 
thought, do our work, and develop our personality. 

"Vast symbol all this of the being of God. Perhaps 
more than symbol; perhaps expression in part of the 
reality. Perchance the infinite Universe that enfolds 
us is, in some sense, the infinite God enfolding us. Per- 
chance our thousand-fold connection therewith is, in real- 
ity, thousand-fold connection with God. Perhaps we, in 
a way, rest upon God when we stand upon the earth, 
are encircled by God when enveloped by the air, breathe 
in God when we breathe the atmosphere, in some sense 
feed upon God when we feed upon bread, are vitalized 
by God when quickened by sunlight, and are held in the 
power of God when held in -the grasp of earth, sun, and 
universe. Such, one may well be persuaded, is the deep- 
est interpretation and truth of things. Living thus within 
the Universe is in reality living, moving and having 
one's being in God. And the ten thousand laws of the 
mighty system that lay hold of us and work day and 
night upon and in us are all powers that go forth from 
Him. In the vast Universe, therefore, that enspheres us, 
we see the infinite God ensphering us *, and in the myriad 
laws that work in us, we see the myriad influences of 
God working out his will. All envelopes are divine en- 
velopes in the last meaning of them. First and last we 
are held within an infinite enfolding Life ; we are envel- 
oped by God." * 

But if even to the outer portals of sense these over- 
whelming evidences of the presence of God are brought, 
* "God and Man," by E. E. Shumaker, Chap. I. 



Mature and the supernatural. 67 

what shall we :ay of that inward revelation which is 
made to every soul? The ensphering God comes very 
close to us, but the indwelling God, — the God whose 
promptings are felt in our wishes, and whose light is 
shining in our thoughts, who makes himself the partner 
of our better selves and abides in us — what shall we say 
of him? 

How near to us, O God, thou art! 

Felt in the movement of the heart; 

Nearer than self thou art to each, 

The truth of thine indwelling teach. 

Eyes art thou unto us, the blind; 
We turn to thee ourselves tcv find; 
We cannot open a door of prayer, 
But thou art seeking entrance there. 

O Father, Spirit, more than near, 
Through all our thought thy voice we hear; 
Our life would welcome thy control, 
Emmanuel, God within the soul. 

Thou fill's t our being's hidden springs ; 
Thou givest our wishes heavenward wings; 
We live thy life, we breathe thy breath, 
And in thy presence is no death. 

Such is the conception of God which the new theology 
gives us. He is the immanent God, filling the universe 
with the fullness of his being ; he is the indwelling God, 
living in the closest and most vital relation with our 
spirits ; how shall we compare him with the miracle- 
working God of the old theology whose home was in 
some far off heaven and whose presence in the world 



68 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



was signalized only by some interruption of the order of 
the universe? Which conception of God is the more im- 
pressive, the more convincing? Would any one who has 
caught any glimpse of his glory as it is revealed in the 
modern conception of him, be willing to go back to the 
dim and nickering light of that old theory? I have lived 
with both theologies, and I know which is best to live 
by. When I hear the proposition that we return to those 
notions of the supernatural which prevailed when I en- 
tered the ministry, it seems much as if some generous 
soul should appear to the captain of the Mauretania as 
he stood on the bridge waiting for his ship to be un- 
loosed from her moorings, and offer him the paddle of 
his canoe with which to propel his vessel across the At- 
lantic; or if some well-meaning philanthropist should 
meet you in the dazzling light of a California noon-day, 
and give you a small tin lantern, with a tallow dip in- 
side, to enable you to find your way home. 

These thoughts which I am trying to help you to 
grasp tonight, have tremendous significance. Of course, 
it is the simplest and most obvious thing to say, that if 
these things are so, there is no other truth of which a 
man can think which has such vast and vital importance. 
Such a conception of the presence in our lives of the 
ever living God, ought to make every man who can think 
thrill in every nerve. I do not mean that it ought to 
frighten him, unless he is consciously and wilfully doing 
what he knows to be wrong, but it ought to make him 
stop and think. No man who gets these central truths 
of the present day theology into his mind can be a trifler ; 
he will feel that it is a wonderful world that he is 



NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 69 

living in; he will feel that life has for him some 
august significance. If he knows that it is no 
figure of speech but the soberest scientific fact that he 
lives and moves and has his being in God; that he 
never lifts his hand without using God's strength ; that 
he never moves his lips without borrowing God's power ; 
that even in his sin and his degradation he is prostituting 
energies that are divine in their origin, and perverting 
power that God lets him use, — if such is the meaning 
of life to him, what manner of man ought he to be? 
Can a man go flippantly and jauntily along the way of 
life, with a consciousness of such a partnership in des- 
tiny as this? Can any man be mean enough to ask or 
permit the Eternal Goodness to be partner with him in 
orgies of animalism, in scrambles after pelf, in cruel 
plunderings of his fellow men, or in reckless disregard 
of their welfare, — in vain-glorious self-exaltation, in 
bitter and fierce and unloving judgments? Surely this 
sense of the immediate presence of God in our lives would 
bring the blush to many a cheek, and wring from us the 
cry 

"Search me, O God, and know my heart, 

Try me and know my thoughts, 

And see if there be any wicked way in me, 

And lead me in the way everlasting." 

But, on the other hand, what dignity does such a 
truth lend to human life — what possibilities does it set 
before us, what hope does it kindle, what courage does 
it inspire ! If we are thus in every normal process of our 
lives in unison with God himself, vibrating to his touch, 
using at every moment the resources of omnipotence, 



60 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

what is not possible for you and me? Join this truth 
with the one we found in our last study, that this infinite 
Power enveloping our lives, throbbing in our veins, pour- 
ing its tides of strength into our frames, is infinite Love, 
— that Fatherhood is the interpretation to us of its pur- 
pose concerning us, — and what a mighty hope must 
spring up in our hearts ! We can begin to understand 
what the Psalmist meant when he cried: 

"The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? 
The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be 
afraid?" 

There is no nobility to which we may not aspire, 
no purity which we may not covet, no greatness of spirit 
which we may not possess, no glory of manhood or 
womanhood to which we may not lay claim. All the 
help we need to live the bravest, whitest, cleanest life, — 
to attain unto the most glorious manhood and woman- 
hood, is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, — it is 
in the very breath of our nostrils and the pulsation of 
our arteries and the aspirations of our hearts. We have 
not to climb to heaven to bring it down or to plunge 
into the depths to call it forth: "Behold it is nigh thee, 
even in thy mouth and in thy heart !" 

You will sometimes hear people saying that the new 
theology has no God in it, and no gospel in it ; may God 
forgive them ! They know not what they are saying. 
How crudely and dimly I am bringing its truths before 
you, I know very well ; it is but a faint echo that I can 
give you of its inspiring message, but there is truth here, 
if some one could only make you see and feel it that 



NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 



61 



has in it the power of God unto salvation. You would 
know and feel, if the truth could be brought home to 
you, that no man of you can afford any longer to live a 
groveling or a grasping life, that you must live as sons 
of God, children of the light, servants and helpers and 
saviors of men. 



IV. 

SIN AND SALVATION. 

(63) 



"O Infinite of righteousness, 

Breath of our inmost being! 
Thy purity will cleanse and bless 

The soul from evil fleeing; 
We hide our sin-stained hearts in Thee, 
And pray, 'As Thou art, let us be!' 

"0 infinitely Loving One, 

Redeemer, Guide, and Brother! 
By Thee, the warm, revealing Sun, 

We see and love each other ; 
With Thy deep Life our lives we blend, 
And find ourselves in Thee, our Friend." 

Lucy Larcom. 

(64) 



IV. 
SIN AND SALVATION. 

WE are to think, this evening, of what the new 
theology has to say about sin and salvation. 
It is a wide field; I fear that we shall not 
be able to cover it, very successfully; but we will try to 
get into our minds some of the most important elements 
of the newer religious thinking on these great subjects. 

There are theories which go by the name of new 
theology which vacate these great words of most of their 
meaning. There are many who openly or tacitly repu- 
diate the idea of sin; who ignore all the vast content of 
human experience in which the sense of sin finds ex- 
pression, or seek to explain it away. If we should be- 
lieve these philosophers we should conclude that the feel- 
ing of guilt, of blame, of ill-desert, which finds voice 
in the literature of all peoples and which so often bur- 
dens our own hearts and darkens our lives, is a mere il- 
lusion, that it represents no reality. It is sometimes 
openly said that there are no sins but those of ignorance ; 
that every man always does what he believes, when he is 
doing it, to be right ; that the transgressions which bring 
upon us suffering and misery are due to a defective un- 
derstanding, and not to a perverted will. 

Much is made, in this philosophy, of heredity and 

environment; the fact that some of us are born with 

strong predispositions to sensuality or selfishness, and that 

many of us are surrounded by influences which tend to 

5 (65) 



66 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



mislead our judgments, and pervert our choices, is 
pointed to as the explanation of those parts of our con- 
duct which are evidently injurious to ourselves and others. 
And there is, of course, a great deal of philosophizing 
which practically denies the fact of moral freedom; 
which teaches that all our conduct is produced by causes 
acting upon our wills; that we have no more choice or 
responsibility than that of the clock-hammer which 
strikes when the machinery sets it in motion. If any 
man calls this the new theology, I have only to say that 
his new theology is not mine. It would be ridiculous 
to call it a theology of any kind, indeed; for theology 
is the science which tries to explain the relations of man 
and God, and this doctrine abolishes God and makes 
of man nothing but a machine, — a creature destitute of 
all the central attributes of what we know as manhood. 
Unless man possesses a genuine moral freedom, moral 
initiative, power to choose between right and wrong, there 
can be no such thing as theology and no such thing as 
morality; there is, indeed, no such thing as personality, 
and really no such thing as a rational doctrine of human 
society. "The whole social consciousness," says Pres- 
ident King, "rests upon the assumption that man has 
worth, as a being capable of character or will or of hap- 
piness, and is deserving in some worthy sense to be called 
a child of God. If the social consciousness is * * * 
with any fairness to be called the resognition of the fully 
personal, this reverence for the personal initiative of men 
cannot be lacking in it. * * * Nor should it escape 
our notice that we strike at the root of all possible rev- 
erence for God, if we deny a real initiative to man. We 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



67 



have no possible philosophic explanation of sin or error, 
consistent with any real reverence for God, if a true hu- 
man will is denied. In Professor Bowne's vigorous lan- 
guage: 'In a system of necessity, every thought, belief, 
conviction, whether truth or superstition, arises with 
equal necessity with every other. * * * On this plane 
of necessary effort the actual is all, and the ideal distinc- 
tions of true and false have as little meaning as they 
would have on the plane of mechanical forces.' " * 

In fact the present day theology, so far as it finds 
the revelation of essential truth in the social conscious- 
ness, must emphasize more and more the fact of moral 
freedom; for the elementary fact of the social conscious- 
ness is the respect for personality; its one emphatic tes- 
timony is the worth of every man, — the sacredness of 
manhood; and if a man's a man, and has the rights of 
a man, he must have the responsibilities of a man. His 
moral character is the central thing, and there is no such 
thing as moral character without moral freedom and 
responsibility. 

These are facts which the new theology recognizes 
as central in all its thinking. The more emphasis it puts 
on personality the more sure is the fact of sin, which is 
simply the revolt of a free personality against moral law. 
And a theology which is truly scientific, — which takes 
in all the facts of human life and fairly estimates them 
■ — will have to make room in its theories for some recog- 
nition of the appalling fact of human sinfulness. "One 
need not be philosopher or theologian," says Professor 
Clarke, "to find out that superficial study only deepens 
♦"Theology and the Social Consciousness," pp. 181, 182. 



68 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



the conception of its greatness. It is conceivable that 
the following facts might be thoroughly ascertained, in 
detail and in total, and morally estimated ; the facts about 
money, regarded as a desirable possession, and the pas- 
sions, and practices that are indulged for the sake of it; 
the facts about untruthfulness, including dishonesty, 
fraud, slander and detraction; the facts about sexual 
passion, with comparison of the moral value that is sac- 
rificed for the sake of gratifying it; the facts about in- 
toxication, with similar comparison of moral values; the 
facts about profanity with estimate of the moral degra- 
dation that is unthinkingly welcomed by those who in- 
dulge in it; the facts about cruelty, whether thoughtless 
brutality or deliberate love of inflicting pain; the facts 
about anger and uncontrolled passion in general, devel- 
oping into malice and into murder ; the facts about moral 
shallowness, irresponsibility, untrustworthiness, surren- 
der of self-respect, contentment with low and unworthy 
life; the facts about daily selfishness, as over against 
kindness, humanity and love." One wonders a little that 
Professor Clarke did not specify in this ugly inventory 
the facts about the gambling habit, in all its phases, 
which is eating out the heart of manliness and honor 
more rapidly than any other social vice, and the facts 
about political infidelity and corruption which include 
bribery, venality and shameless treachery to the highest 
trusts. Perhaps, however, he meant to include these 
under the category of the love of money, and the prac- 
tices that are indulged for the sake of it. "Such an in- 
vestigation," the writer goes on, "though of course not 
practicable, is quite conceivable and the amount of evil 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



69 



which such a study of familiar facts would bring to 
light is utterly appalling. It is true that much good 
would also be found, and that the responsibility of the 
evil is often divided between him who commits it and the 
ancestors who have made him what he is. It is true 
also that some parts of the evil that is commonly called 
sin is rightly chargeable to imperfection or immaturity 
or ignorance; nevertheless, observation shows that sin 
is the abiding fact of the human race, just as Christ and 
the consent of ages testify."* 

These are the phenomena of human sinfulness. 
What, now, is the nature of sin? 

It is well to dispose at once of some of the traditional 
theories, which have played a great part in the history of 
Christian thought. 

The theology on which most of us older folks were 
brought up divided sin into two categories — original 
and actual sin. Actual sin was the conscious and inten- 
tional transgression of the moral law, the evil deeds or 
the culpable omissions of which we in our own persons and 
by our own choices are guilty. This is the kind of sin of 
which we have been talking. Concerning this the new 
theology, as I understand it, raises no question. It is 
a phenomenon too sadly familiar to be disputed. 

But the other kind of sin — what the theologians 
call original sin — the new theology does not believe in. 
The old theology held that on account of the sin of 
Adam all the descendants of Adam were made sinners. 
It was not only that we inherited from our first ances- 
tor weakened or impaired moral natures, tendencies to 

* "Outline of Christian Theology," pp. 229, 230. 



70 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



evil. That might well have been true. The doctrine 
was that we had inherited his guilt; that God held us 
blameworthy on account of his sin and punishable be- 
cause of it. Adam, as the theory figured it, was the 
federal head of the race. God had a covenant with him, 
that if he was obedient all his descendants should be vir- 
tuous and blessed; while if he disobeyed they should all 
share the penalty of his disobedience. He disobeyed and 
as the old catechism says, we "all sinned in him and 
fell with him in his first transgression," — or as the 
New England pioneer more tersely put it : 

"In Adam's fall 
We sinned all." 

In consequence of this sin of our first parent we all 
come into the world "under the wrath and curse" of 
God, "and [are] so made liable to all the miseries of 
this life, death itself and the pains of hell forever." 
Thus, for nothing that we had done, or consented to, 
the old theology told us that God held us all deserving 
of eternal punishment in hell. 

The doctrine of election came in here, however, 
and assured us that God, out of his mere good pleasure, 
has chosen some of these doomed and lost ones upon 
whom he would bestow his grace; and the sins of these 
were remitted through the expiation made by Christ upon 
the cross. Among infants who died in infancy, before 
they were capable of actual transgression, some were 
elect and some non-elect; the elect infants were saved 
by the blood of Christ; the non-elect were consigned to 



SIN AND SALVATION. 71 

eternal misery on account of original sin, — their im- 
plication in the sin of Adam. 

It has been a good while now since this doctrine of 
infant damnation was taught in the pulpits of the most 
orthodox churches. It has been so long that a great 
many fairly intelligent people have been heard denying 
that it ever was believed or taught. Dr. Henry Morton 
Dexter, one of our great Congregational historians, once 
took me up quite sharply, when I asserted that the doc- 
trine was formerly one of the cardinal doctrines of the 
Calvinistic creed, and challenged me to prove that any 
Congregational minister had ever taught it. It was per- 
fectly easy for me to fill columns of his newspaper with 
quotations from sermons of the greatest Congregational 
divines most explicitly declaring that non-elect infants 
dying in infancy were doomed to eternal misery. Cal- 
vin himself said that it was a horrible decree, but that 
there was no disputing it. 

The doctrine was most plainly taught in the West- 
minster Confession, of the Presbyterian Church (of 
which the Savoy Confession of the Congregational 
Churches was a simple duplicate) until 1902, when the 
General Assembly made a declaratory statement prac- 
tically eliminating it from the Confession of Faith. It 
is a long time, as I have said, since it has been preached 
in the Presbyterian Church or the Congregational 
churches. Yet the implication of this doctrine of original 
sin linger yet in some of the beliefs of the church. There 
are still a good many Christians who are more or less 
troubled with fear lest their infants dying unbaptized 



72 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

may miss the blessedness of heaven. This is a survival 
of that dreadful doctrine. It is based on the belief that 
we are all still under the curse of the Adamic transgres- 
sion. Baptism, it is supposed by some, cleanses infants 
from the taint of original sin ; but when baptism is omit- 
ted the wrath and curse of God still rests upon the souls 
of all born of woman — adults or infants. 

It is amazing that a notion, so horribly unethical, 
should linger in the minds of human beings in the twen- 
tieth century. It is strange that any one who has known 
anything about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ should deem it possible that he could count all 
the children of Adam guilty of Adam's sin, and worthy 
of eternal death because of something that happened 
thousands of years before they were born. 

But is it not true, you ask, that we suffer the con- 
sequences of the sins of our ancestors? Yes; we are so 
linked together that the evil that parents do entails upon 
their children weakness and disability and suffering ; but 
sin is not entailed; sin is not inherited. The children 
are not to blame for what their parents did, nor are they 
to blame for being in this weak and disabled condition; 
they are not to blame for anything which they inherit; 
every just man pities them for that evil inheritance ; 
how much more does our heavenly Father regard them 
with compassion, and seek to rescue them from their in- 
firmities ! If they come into the world with blunted sen- 
sibilities, and abnormal cravings, and tendencies to evil, 
he takes all that into consideration, in judging their con- 
duct. You and I would do that, and if we, being evil, 



SIN AND SALVATION. 73 

can make such allowances, how much more will our 
heavenly Father deal mercifully with his children ! 

So then, the new theology puts aside, as essentially 
pagan, the old doctrine of original sin by which most of 
the old theology was shaped. Sin cannot be inherited. 
God is just. Do I call this the new theology? It is 
not really so very new. Listen to the prophet Ezekiel : 

"The soul that sinneth, it shall die; the son shall 
not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father 
bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the 
righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the 
wicked shall be upon him." 

How the framers of that old dogma managed to in- 
terpret this eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel I have never 
been able to understand. 

There is no such thing as inherited sin. Sin, as 
old Dr. Emmons insisted, consists in sinning. All sin 
is actual sin. And now what is the nature of actual 
sin? 

It is sometimes supposed to be simple animalism — 
the predominance of the bodily appetites. But the bodily 
appetites are not necessarily sinful. Under normal con- 
trol they are elements of wholesome life. It is true that 
the progress of man is from animalism to spirituality, 
and that many of his worst temptations are due to the 
imperfect subjugation of the lower nature to the higher, 
yet as one says, "the sin does not dwell in the fact that 
man still retains a nature akin to that of the animals be- 
low him, but in this, that the nature that is akin to God 
yields to the nature that is common to man and beasts." 



74 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

Yet it still remains true that the worst sins of man have 
nothing to do with the flesh; the perversion of the higher 
nature is deadlier than the indulgence of the lower. 

We may say that sin is simply abnormal action. It 
is the violation, by the soul, of its own law of life. 
Whatever tends to the perfection of my soul, of my man- 
hood, in its physical, intellectual and moral elements, is 
right; whatever interferes with that tendency and pre- 
vents me from realizing my manhood is wrong. 

Does some one say that sin is an offense against 
God? Well, that is true. But what Matthew Arnold 
says is also profoundly true, that the stream of tendency 
by which all things strive to fulfil the law of their being 
is only another name for God. That is what we mean 
by the immanent God. Any action of my will which 
hinders me from fulfilling the law of my being is there- 
fore a sin against God. God is working in me, to per- 
fect my manhood. Whatever I do to obstruct that work- 
ing, to impair my manhood is a sin against him. 

But we have not yet reached the heart of the mat- 
ter. And here we will let Professor Clarke help us once 
more: 

"Sin may be viewed with reference to its motive and 
inner moral quality; we observe the evil, whether in act 
or in character and estimate it in the light of the prin- 
ciples from which it springs. Thus sin is the placing 
of self-will and selfishness above the claims of love and 
duty. 

"Love looking upward toward God or outward 
toward man is the true law of life; and such love, filial 
and fraternal, will render it impossible for a man to be 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



76 



a selfish, self-regarding, self-seeking person. It is true 
that there is a self-regard which in its place is not sin- 
ful, but normal and worthy; and yet to a man in the 
right attitude, not self but God and men will appear to 
be the chief aim to be regarded, and the general claim 
of duty will appear more urgent than all self-interest. 
Before God such a man will be humble, reverent and 
obedient, and toward men he will be brotherly and help- 
ful. Never will he put self in the place of God as the 
Lord of his life, or in the place of humanity as that 
which he strives to benefit. 

"Against this right position sin takes selfishness or 
self-will, as the final law of action. Under its impulse 
a man says, 'I will act from myself and for myself.. 
My own will and not God shall be the source and law 
of my action, and my own self and not humanity shall 
be the end to which my action is directed. Nor shall 
duty itself be so strong with me as the claim of my 
own self-will.' This assertion of selfishness or self- 
will as the law of action is the characteristic assertion 
of a sinful life."* 

This is the root from which has sprung that vast 
and noxious growth which we were contemplating a 
little while ago. And when sin is thus defined, as "the 
placing of selfishness or self-will above the claims of 
love and duty," few will be found, I think, to claim 
for themselves sinlessness. The presence of a principle 
in our lives which makes us prefer our own pleasure to 
the welfare of others, — which makes us willing to 
prosper either at the expense of others or in careless 
* "Outline of Christian Theology," pp. 235, 236. 



76 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

disregard of their happiness; which makes us want to 
think of ourselves as the center of our world, and leads 
us to desire that all the rest of the creation shall revolve 
about us obediently, ministering to our pleasure, grati- 
fying our whims, deferring to our judgment, — this is 
the root out of which the sin of the world has grown. 
A recent essayist speaks of a temper of mind which, as 
it contemplates the struggle for existence, regards "in- 
difference to others and absolute self-interest, [as] not 
only permissible, but * * * more and more pos- 
itively demanded." These modern realists say: "The 
world we see about us is one where only a few can 
succeed and where many must fail. There are not 
good things enough for all. The question is not 
whether such a state of things is right or just. On the 
contrary it must be admitted to be a hard, unreasonable, 
unjust universe. It is not for the individual, however, 
set without consent of his own in such a universe, to 
change it. His only problem is to make it certain that 
in such a universe he is 'the hammer, not the anvil.' " 

In that temper of mind we discover the inmost 
principle of the sin of the world. It implies a scornful 
and even contemptuous unbelief in God; it is the revela- 
tion of a consciousness which is essentially anti-social. 

Now, God forbid that I should accuse all my 
fellowmen of consciously cherishing such a temper as 
this. I think that there are comparatively few who 
would ever admit to themselves any such purpose. Yet 
most of us find ourselves, now and then, acting on some 
such principle, and all of us feel, very often, that this 
kind of egoism, by which a man is disposed to look 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



77 



out for himself, no matter what happens to the rest, is 
the heart of the world's sin. It is because there is so 
much of this in the world that the world is so full of 
conflict and misery. When we look abroad, upon the 
poverty and suffering and ignorance and distress still 
abounding ; when we see what vast human needs there 
are unsatisfied, — this on the one hand, and on the other 
how much of luxurious and even profligate expenditure 
there is ; how many there are who are thinking only of 
their own enjoyments and diversions, who are utterly 
oblivious of the misery and the misfortune that sur- 
round them, we cannot help feeling that it is a very 
selfish world, and it is rather hard for us to convince 
ourselves that we are not ourselves more or less in- 
volved in all this greed and heartlessness. 

It is certainly true to say that society, in these days, 
is experiencing a good deal of what may be properly 
called conviction of sin. We all know and feel that 
something is wrong with the social order, and I do not 
think that it requires any very subtle analysis to dis- 
cover that the root of that wrong is the selfishness in 
human hearts. It isn't the trusts ; it isn't the corpora- 
tions ; it isn't the trades unions ; it isn't the tariff ; it 
isn't capitalism — these are only symptoms : it is the 
rampant and riotous selfishness in human hearts : it is 
the disposition to look out for ourselves, to get what 
we can, and have a good time, and not care much what 
becomes of the hindmost. This is the fundamental 
trouble with our industrial society from top to bottom, 
and the malady is epidemic, there are not many of us 
who are not more or less affected by it. 



78 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

If this is the essential nature of sin, — if it is 
essentially a kind of self-love which makes us indiffer- 
ent to the welfare of others, — it is rather absurd to 
deny its existence or its prevalence. The new theology, 
at any rate, is not disposed to ignore it. It is a stub- 
born fact, a social fact of portentous dimensions. We 
do not need to go back to Adam, or to resort to any 
theories of imputation; the evidence confronts us when- 
ever we open our eyes. 

To prove that a man is a sinner it is not necessary, 
then, to show that he is a murderer or a liar or a thief 
or a counterfeiter or a forger or a burglar; he may even 
be a man who never drinks nor smokes nor dances nor 
plays cards nor goes to the theater; the only question 
is whether he is chargeable with putting selfishness or 
self-will above love and duty. That sin is enough to 
shut any man out of heaven. There cannot be any 
heaven where that spirit is. That spirit brings hell 
wherever it goes, in this world and every other world. 

If this is the nature of sin, what is the penalty of 
sin? The old theology made this penalty to consist of 
suffering inflicted upon the sinner by a judicial process 
in the future life. Hell was a place of eternal punish- 
ment, provided by the divine justice, to which were 
consigned after death and the judgment all unforgiven 
sinners. Of the meaning of heaven and hell I shall 
speak in the next lecture. The penalty of sin will also 
be more fully considered at that time. It is sufficient 
to say that the new theology regards those conceptions 
of judicial punishment as based on analogies which 
convey much less than the whole truth, and teaches that 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



79 



the reality of punishment is something much closer to 
our experience and more verifiable than those old 
theories made it. 

The penalty of sin, as the new theology teaches, 
consists in the natural consequences of sin. Sin is 
selfishness; what, then, are the natural consequences of 
selfishness? If a man freely indulges this disposition to 
place his own interest and pleasure above the claims of 
love and duty what will be the natural effect upon the 
character of that man? You do not need to go to the 
creeds or to the Bible or to the theologians to find out; 
just read the newspapers and the novels, and keep your 
eyes open to what is going on about you. The new 
theology doesn't refer you to authorities on this subject 
— it goes straight to human life for its facts. 

In the first place the man who indulges this selfish 
disposition will find it strengthening its hold upon him; 
that is a law of mind, and it works itself out in his 
experience. The habit of preferring his own happiness 
to other people's grows on him; he has less and less 
compunction about prospering at the expense of other 
people; he has less and less compassion for those less 
fortunate; he is more and more inclined to say that 
those whom he pushes from his path in his progress are 
themselves to blame for their misfortunes ; he becomes 
more and more self-centered and intolerant and unsocial. 
This is the natural penalty of selfishness. 

Other sins grow out of this by a logical necessity. 
The man who makes his own interest supreme is apt 
to think that those who interfere with his interests have 
no right to the truth, and deception or falsehood is the 



80 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



natural consequences. When he begins to lie it is easy 
to keep on ; every lie he tells is a seed from which other 
lies spring and multiply, thirty, sixty, an hundred fold. 
His love of the truth is weakened and gradually dis- 
appears. 

Perhaps the animal propensities in him clamor for 
indulgence, and as it is always the self to which they 
minister they easily get their own way. These indul- 
gences, also, grow into habits which strengthen as time 
goes on; the man comes mbre and more under the 
domain of his fleshly nature; his finer sensibilities are 
dulled; his imagination is filled with pictures of sensual 
delights; he loses his relish for cleanliness and manli- 
ness and purity; he becomes false and foul in thought 
and life. 

It is needless to protract this analysis. These are 
facts which every one of you can verify in your daily 
observation. These are the natural penalties of sin, as 
they are working themselves out in the characters of 
men before your eyes every day. Perhaps some of you 
have even clearer evidence of them within your own 
consciousness, in your own experiences. The penalty of 
sin is sin. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap. If you sow selfishness you will reap selfishness. 
If you sow falsehood you will reap falsehood. If you 
sow to the flesh you will reap corruption. These are 
natural consequences. They are immediate. They are 
inevitable. They are cumulative. 

There are also social consequences, of vast im- 
portance, on which I cannot dwell. Such a life affects 
other lives continually ; it entails suffering and loss upon 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



81 



the victims of its selfishness ; it communicates contagion ; 
it kindles resentments a«nd antagonisms; it tends to 
produce enmity and strife and malevolence. What 
kind of a society would it be in which every man freely 
indulged his selfish tendencies, and permitted them to 
produce their natural fruits in his character? 

It is generally assumed that pain or suffering of 
some kind is the penalty of sin. It often does bring 
suffering as its consequence, but that is not always true, 
and it is by no means the worst consequence of sin. 
The wages of sin is always death, not always suffering, 
for spiritual death is often a painless process. It may 
be accompanied by numbness, — by insensibility. De- 
terioration, degradation, is the penalty of sin. He that 
sows to the flesh reaps not always suffering, but always 
corruption. 

There is, indeed, one natural consequence of sin, 
of which most of us have some knowledge. That is 
remorse, the rankling memory of wrong committed, 
which is now, perhaps, remediless ; the bitter scourgings 
of conscience for faithlessness or disloyalty or cruelty or 
neglect for which it is now beyond our power to atone. 

Such then is sin, and such is the penalty of sin. 
I do not think that there is any man here who will 
deny either the fact of sin, or the reality of its penalty. 
And if this is the penalty of sin you will see, of course, 
that it cannot be borne by any one else in your stead. 
It consists in the deadly effect of sin upon your own 
character, and these effects cannot be transferred to the 
character of another. It is not possible that another 
should be made selfish and false and foul by your evil 
6 



82 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



deeds ; and if it were possible it surely would not do 
you any good. The recognition of the fact that the 
punishment of sin consists in the natural consequences 
of sin does away at once and forever with all theories of 
legal substitution. 

Salvation cannot, therefore, come to you through 
the infliction upon some one else of penalties or of 
judicial sufferings deserved by you. 

What is more, salvation, in the teachings of the 
new theology, is not concerned primarily with penalty, 
but with sin. It does not seek, first, to save men from 
the consequences of their sins ; it seeks to save them 
from the sins themselves. It does not stop with the 
symptoms; it goes straight to the seat of the disease. 

Let us bring this down from the realm of gener- 
alities and abstractions to ourselves, — to the men and 
women here before me. If sin is what we have said 
that it is you are not going to deny that you are sinners. 
Nor can you deny that sin has brought into your lives 
and into the society in which you move, just such con- 
sequences as we have been considering. I have spoken 
of salvation from sin. Do you want to be saved from 
sin? Do you want to get rid of the selfishness which 
makes you so often push your own interests at the ex- 
pense of other people, or in disregard of their welfare 
and happiness, — the selfishness which makes you greedy 
and envious and proud and exclusive; the selfishness 
which gives rein to your appetites and passions, and 
leads you to play fast and loose with truth, and insti- 
gates you to the cowardice that shirks responsibility, 
and the infidelity which denies your highest obligations? 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



83 



Is it not a thoroughly bad principle of life? Is it not 
causing you shame and sorrow and the loss of self- 
respect and weariness and trouble every day? Wouldn't 
you like to get rid of it, and to get a new principle of 
life implanted in your heart, the principle of good will, 
the principle of loyalty, the principle of service; to 
have it as the ruling motive of your life to glorify God 
on this earth and to do good to men as you have oppor- 
tunity? That would be salvation. He who has learned 
to love God who is the Perfect Goodness and Truth, 
with the highest love of his heart, and to love his neigh- 
bor as himself, is a saved man, no matter what creed he 
may profess nor what language he may speak. 

And how shall we learn this lesson of love? How 
shall we cease this morbid tendency to make ourselves 
the center of the world in which we move? 

The Scripture tells us that the way to be saved 
from this sin of selfishness is to repent and be converted, 
— or as the new version puts it, to repent and turn 
again. What is meant by this word repent? It means, 
primarily, "Change your mind." Get a new idea of 
what life means. The trouble with this world lying 
in wickedness is that the people think the way to happi- 
ness is the way of self-seeking; that each man gets the 
good of life by discriminating his own interest from the 
interests of his fellow men, and pursuing his own inter- 
est, either at their expense or in indifference to them. 
That is the ruling idea of the street and the mart and 
the caucus. Men are selfish because they think that 
selfishness is the best policy, — that it is the way to find 
the satisfactions of life. That is absolutely false; it is 



84 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



the way to miss them, to lose them. The first thing 
that any man needs, therefore, is to change his mind — 
to get rid of this idea, and replace it by another. As 
a man thinketh in his heart so is he, and it is futile to 
try to save a man from the sin of selfishness, so long as 
he thinks that selfishness is the way of life and happi- 
ness. So the first word of Jesus is this word Repent. 
Change your mind ! 

But how shall his mind be changed? The answer 
to that question is the next word of our Gospel. 
Believe. Believe Christ. This is the first thing to do. 
Instead of saying believe in Christ or believe on Him, 
or believe something about him, which suggests theolog- 
ical formularies not easy of comprehension, I would be- 
gin by saying, Believe him. This is a perfectly simple 
thing to do. Believe what he tells you about the mean- 
ing of life. Believe what he has said in the Sermon on 
the Mount. Believe that the Golden Rule is the right 
rule to live by every day and everywhere. If you will 
believe this you will be in a fair way to get rid of your 
selfishness. 

The trouble with most of us is that we do not 
believe it. We do not regard it as practical. So a 
great many of us are content with believing in him as a 
legal substitute, and comforting ourselves with the assur- 
ance that by thus believing our sins are forgiven; 
putting aside these searching sayings of his by which 
He seeks to guide us away from selfishness which is 
death, to love which is life. 

Some of you are sure that Christ has saved you 
from your sins, but your lives clearly show that you do 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



85 



not believe his words. Now, the sin from which you 
need to be saved is selfishness; and how can He save 
you from selfishness so long as in the bottom of your 
heart you believe that the way of selfishness is the best 
way — the best way for you. The very beginning of 
salvation, I say, is the change of mind by which you 
come to see and realize that the way of Christ, which is 
the way of unselfishness, is the right way for you to live. 

The one thing which the new theology makes 
central is believing Christ. It insists that his words 
are the words of life, that his truth is the bread of life, 
that his way is the way of life. It maintains that it is 
rational to believe him, that he is worthy of our confi- 
dence, that he has won for himself a name that is 
above every name, and that he has won it not by pleas- 
ing himself, or serving himself, but by living the life 
which he enjoins, and sealing his testimony by his 
death; and that when he tells us that the way of love 
is the way of life he speaks with authority. The one 
thing that this world lying in wickedness needs to-day 
is just to believe this, to believe what he says. 

Suppose that all the people in Columbus could be 
brought to see that what Jesus says about life is true; 
that the right way to regard one another is not as 
competitors or rivals or opponents, but as friends and 
brothers. Suppose that all employers and all employees, 
all traders and customers, all landlords and tenants, all 
lenders and borrowers, all officers of the commonwealth, 
all citizens of the commonwealth, all husbands and 
wives, all parents and children, all human beings in 
every social relation, could have brought home to them 



86 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



the truth which Jesus has taught us about the right way 
of living together, should we not see a great river of 
salvation flowing through the streets of this city? 
Should we not behold a new Columbus coming down 
out of heaven from God? 

Well, if believing Christ would bring salvation to 
all of us, it would bring it, not less surely, to every one 
of us; and it will come to all of us, only when every 
one of us accepts it for himself and enters into the joy 
of it. 

It is certain that when we had thus believed Christ 
and had begun to live by his word, we should want to 
know more about him. To one who had given you a 
new revelation of the meaning of life you would feel 
profoundly grateful, and you would desire to be better 
acquainted with him. He is not here in the flesh, but 
that is just as well ; as Paul says, we have the mind of 
Christ; in the four gospels it is revealed with wonder- 
ful clearness. If you will take these four gospels and 
live with them a year or two, studying them every day, 
pondering the words of this great Teacher and letting 
their deep meanings sink into your soul, watching him 
as he meets the emergencies that arise in his life, trying 
to get into your mind the real significance of his life 
and character, you will find that some strange .and 
happy changes are taking place in the central motives 
of your life. 

For we all know that he has done more — a thou- 
sand times more — than any one else who ever lived in 
the world toward getting the idea and the spirit of 
unselfish service into the hearts and lives of men. The 



SIN AND SALVATION. 



87 



most and the best that the world knows about the un- 
selfish life it has learned from him. If you really want 
to get rid of that old, bad, selfish temper and to get 
the new life of love into your heart, the best thing you 
can do is to get acquainted with him. 

It would hasten this result, no boudt, if you should 
try to find some kind of work to do like that which 
occupied him while he was here ; you would understand 
him better; you would get acquainted with him faster 
if you were working along the same lines that he was 
following here among men. 

Thus through believing his word, and abiding in 
his truth, and sharing his life, we shall be brought into 
fellowship with the Father whose life he shares and 
whose love he reveals. Whoso enters into that great 
Friendship has passed from death unto life, from the 
death of selfishness to the life of service. This is his 
own word. 

This is salvation through Jesus Christ. He shows 
us the way of life ; by his great self-sacrifice he wins 
our confidence, and we become partakers of his spirit; 
through Him we come to know the true God and eternal 
life. 

Sin is selfishness. We are saved from that sin by 
believing the word of Jesus that love is life; by receiv- 
ing his life, through fellowship with Him; by following 
him in the way of service. 

This may seem an elementary account of a great 
matter ; simple it is, as all the greatest truths are ; but 
it is not a light thing. What would happen if the 
Church of God should heartily accept this truth about 



88 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



the nature of sin, and this truth about the meaning of 
salvation? What manner of community should we be 
living in, if all the people who are numbered among 
the saved were saved after this plan of salvation? 
"What customs," asks Dr. Clarke, "would society take 
up if it were to undertake living according to the Golden 
Rule and the law of neighbor love? What new ranges 
of personal action would be opened? What new 
methods in the field of business? What new modes of 
neighborly association? What new and wiser forms of 
help? * * * What would the Golden Rule and the 
law of neighbor love, and the sense of human value make 
of the present system of competition? How would they 
work among nations? What would they do with war? 
* * * "What would happen to-day if society were 
transformed into the Kingdom of God through adoption 
of Jesus' spirit of self-sacrificing helpfulness as the spirit 
of all life? What awakenings would there be? What 
age-long neglects would cease? What unexpected 
recognitions would occur? What mighty inspirations of 
service would take possession of powers long indolent or 
turned to selfishness? What great new works of fellow- 
ship and helpfulness would be undertaken and carried 
through? * * * What will this passion of the 
cross be when it becomes a power and runs through the 
world? Against what will it blaze as wrath? What 
tyrannies and injustices will it burn up? Into what 
forms of loving service will it throw itself as life? 
How long could a thousand disgraces last if the self- 
giving spirit of Jesus had free course, inspiring men to 
take up the cross and follow him? How long could 



SlN AND SALVATION. 89 

any one think that God was unrevealed or had forsaken 
the earth? How long could humanity resist the warm 
tide of blessing that came flooding in? How long could 
the Kingdom of Heaven be delayed? Nay, the King- 
dom would have come in power I" * 



* The Ideal of Jesus, pp. 



V. 

HEAVEN AND HELL. 

(91) 



"Have ye not still my witness 
Within yourselves alway, 
My hand that on the keys of life 
For bliss or bale I lay? 

"Still, in perpetual judgment 
I hold assize within, 
With sure reward of holiness, 
And dread rebuke of sin. 

"My Gerizim and Ebal 

Are in each human soul, 
The still small voice of blessing, 
And Sinai's thunder roll. 

"The stern behest of duty, 

The doom-book open thrown, 
The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear, 
Are with yourselves alone." 

John G. Whittier. 

(92) 



V. 
HEAVEN AND HELL. 

I ONCE heard a certain popular preacher say that 
no one knew anything about heaven or hell, except 
what he had learned from the Bible ; that there was 
absolutely no other source of information or knowledge 
upon either subject. It was an amazing statement to 
be made by one who assumed to be a guide in spiritual 
things, and sharply recalled the Lord's saying: "If 
the blind lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch." 
What the preacher was talking about, of course, was 
those traditional places or localities known as heaven 
and hell. But about such localities the Bible gives us 
no information. Most of what this preacher knew of 
the topography of heaven and hell he had probably 
learned not from the Bible but from Milton's "Paradise 
Lost." I do not think that he was familiar with 
Dante's great poem. Those symbolical visions of the 
Apocalypse are not descriptive of heaven; the picture 
of the Great White Throne and the rainbow round it, 
and thunderings and lightning issuing from beneath it, 
and the four living creatures, each of them with six 
wings, full of eyes round about and within, — one with 
the face of a calf and one of a lion and one of a man 
and one of an eagle, — all this is not, I dare say, by 
any intelligent person, supposed to be a description of 
any part of the scenery of heaven. These are the 

(93) 



94 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

merest symbolisms ; precisely what they are intended to 
typify we may not know, but we are sure that they are 
not realistic representations of anything visible in 
heaven. Nor is the figure of a lake of fire and brim- 
stone by any fairly sane person at the present day sup- 
posed to be a literal description of hell. At least I 
do not know of any living teacher, orthodox or heter- 
odox, who has the least reputation for intelligence, not 
to say scholarship, who takes this view of it. How it 
may be with Brother Jasper, of Richmond, I do not 
know; I suppose that he accepts the literal interpreta- 
tion. But there cannot be any considerable number of 
fairly intelligent reading people in the world today 
who really accept it. All these Apocatyptic represen- 
tations are known to be figurative. 

Perhaps I am speaking too confidently about the 
intelligence of this generation. One does meet, now and 
then, with astonishing exhibitions of ignorance on the 
part of persons who are supposed to be educated, espe- 
cially as it concerns matters of religion. I think that 
the average newspaper reporter still supposes that hell 
is a burning -pit, and when he hears any one saying that 
he does not believe in such a place of torment, he makes 
haste to report him as having ceased to believe in hell. 
Quite a flurry was caused by such a report, not long ago, 
of something said by certain Sunday school teachers in 
Washington. Newspaper reports of theological opinions 
are always to be taken with many grains of salt. When 
a few years ago Dr. Abbott said that the conception of 
God as a venerable man, with gray hairs, seated on a 
white throne, could not be entertained, and that the at- 



Heaven and hell. 05 

tribution to him of hands and feet and eyes must be 
understood symbolically, the newspapers immediately 
published him all over the country as having ceased to 
believe in the personality of God. It was, of course, im- 
possible for the reporters to conceive of a personality 
which was not represented by a human form and figure. 

Still I think it must be true that most of those to 
whom I am speaking are aware that these terms of the 
book of visions are symbols and not descriptions. 

The pictures of the New Jerusalem in the last chap- 
ters of the Revelation, undoubtedly refer to the future 
glory of this earth. The New Jerusalem of that vision 
was seen coming down from heaven to earth. And there 
is no attempt in any other part of that book to show us 
anything about the external or physical features of the 
blessed life. In no other portion of the Bible is there 
any such description. 

That we shall live somewhere in space is highly 
probable. At any rate it is impossible for us to conceive 
of existence — personal existence — existence which pos- 
sesses power of communication, which is not in some 
form ; and form must occupy space ; form is limited 
space. Tennyson, in thinking of his friend who had 
gone on to the life beyond, and of the theory that each 
is re-absorbed at death into the "general Soul," cries out 
that this 

"Is faith as vague as all unsweet : 
Eeternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside. 

And I shall know him when we meet." 



96 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

This belief is in accordance with all our experience. 
Any other condition of personal existence is inconceiv- 
able. That the life to come must be a life connected 
with place is a necessary assumption. But the essential 
fact about it will not be the locality, the surroundings, 
the environment. Heaven is not limited to any place in 
this life or the next; it has no boundaries. It is not 
place that makes happiness or misery. That is not true 
of life anywhere. Too many unhappy human beings 
think so. About half of the people whom I know sup- 
pose that their discomfort and restlessness is due to their 
location; that if they were somewhere else it would be 
well with them. But the accident of place has very 
little to do with the real good of life. That which 
makes heaven heaven, that which makes hell hell, 
is not the scenery, or the climate, or the circum- 
stances, but what is in the heart of the man. The 
reality of it, the substance of it, is not physical but 
spiritual. The essential facts of heaven and hell are 
facts which are not revealed through the senses, and 
which cannot be shown on a map or described in any 
words, — even sacred words. They can never be known 
except by the spirit. They are spiritual things and can 
only be spiritually discerned. The essential elements of 
heaven and of hell are in every man's heart, in every 
man's life. He no more needs a book to put him in pos- 
session of it than he needs a book to initiate him info 
the mysteries of love or of despair. 

Faith, Paul says, gives us the substance of the things 
we hope for. If heaven is the completion and crown 
of our hopes faith gives us the substance of heaven. Not 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 



97 



the shadow of it, the symbol of it, the strong assurance 
of it, merely, but the substance of it. 

If faith gives us life, it must give us the blessed- 
ness of life. You cannot have the wave without the 
spray, the peach without the bloom, the summer without 
the fragrance and the song. The one is the effluence of 
the other. Now the one gift which is promised by Christ 
to those who follow him is life. With him they enter 
into life. In him was life and the life was the life of 
men. He that hath the Son hath life. His is not merely 
the promise of it, the assurance of it, it is the present 
possession of it. This is life eternal that they believe on 
thee, the only true God, and on Jesus Christ his Son 
whom thou hast sent. If a genuine discipleship with 
Jesus Christ puts any man in possession of life, — of 
what the apostle calls life indeed, — of what Jesus him- 
self describes as eternal life, must not the substance of 
what we call heaven belong to him even now? And 
must not his knowledge of it be immediate, certain, 
personal ? 

We must not too lightly speak all those wonderful 
words of Jesus about the kingdom of heaven. It was 
the gospel of that kingdom that he came preaching. The 
first word of public discourse that he ever spoke, so far 
as we know, was this: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, 
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven!" All that he said 
about it seems to imply that it is here on the earth. 
"Neither shall we say lo, here ! or lo, there ! for behold 
the Kingdom of God — (the phrase is used alternately 
with the Kingdom of heaven) is within you." The proposi- 
tion has a pregnant meaning; it signifies in you, individ- 
6 



yo PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

ually, as a spiritual force, and among you, collectively, 
as a social law. It is here — that is the idea. And 
where the Kingdom of heaven is, the substance of heaven 
must be. It is here — in how many hearts, in how 
many homes, in how many groups of loving children 
of our Father who have learned Christ's law and 
are living by it? The man who knows nothing about 
heaven except what the Bible tells him, must have been 
a hermit, and a sour-hearted one at that. He needs to 
be born again, in order that he may see the Kingdom of 
God, the heavenly Jerusalem, whose goodly palaces shine 
on every side of him, whose trees of life are growing in 
many an Earthly Paradise. The man to whom nothing of 
heaven is visible in this world will never see heaven in 
any world, until he is changed, until his eyes are opened. 

What then is heaven? There are many different 
terms in which we may describe it, all of which, when 
carefully interpreted, amount to the same thing. I will 
not puzzle you with multiplying and reconciling them; 
let me give you one which is, perhaps, as comprehensive 
as any. Heaven is harmony with God. To experience 
the substance of heaven is to feel that we are in fellow- 
ship and communion with the Father of our Spirits, 
with the Infinite Source of law and love. 

If you will recall the suggestions of the heavenly 
life that the Bible gives us you will remember that this 
thought of unity with God, of friendship with God, is 
always present. Our Lord's words to his disciples in 
his last conversation with them lay much emphasis upon 
these thoughts that we are to be with God, to dwell in 
his presence, to abide in his love. It is in the Father's 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 



99 



house he tells us, that we are to dwell with him; there 
are many mansions in that dwelling; he is going before 
us to prepare a place for us, and he will meet us and 
welcome us to that eternal home, that where he is we 
may be also. The companionship implies the spiritual 
harmony. Only those can bear to dwell together who 
are one in mind and heart. What makes the home is 
not furniture and upholstery but the essential unity in 
feeling and purpose of those who dwell within it. The 
fundamental implication of all that is said in the Bible 
about the heavenly life, is this condition of essential one- 
ness with God. It is a condition in which God's thought 
rules our thinking, in which his purpose concerning us 
is the law of our conduct, in which we join with the 
poet, in his sublime prayer : 

"Our wills are ours, we know not how, 
Our wills are ours to make them thine." 

It is this condition, I suppose, that Paul is describ- 
ing when he speaks of possessing the mind of the spirit, 
the mind that is pervaded and controlled by the truth 
and the love of the spirit. That the spirit of man is 
made to be filled and illumined by the divine spirit is 
just as true as that the eye is made for sight or the ear 
for sound. If there is perfect wisdom, perfect truth, 
perfect love in the universe, we know that our spirits 
ought to be and may be in touch with all that divineness. 

We could not, if we would, convince ourselves that 
a Power and a Goodness like that were foreign to our 
spirits, or inaccessible to them. There are instincts and 
aspirations in our souls that testify, more strongly than 



100 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



any words, that that kind of fellowship is ours by birth- 
right. "The spirit beareth witness to our spirits that we 
are the children of God." "As the heart panteth after the 
water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." This 
is the life for which we are made, this life of commu- 
nion and fellowship with God. This is life indeed. Until 
we have realized this, in some degree, we do not know 
the meaning of life. The mind of the Spirit is life. And 
whoever has entered into this relation with the Father 
of his spirit has begun to live the heavenly life. What 
his surroundings may be matters little, nor what may be 
his possession or his prospects for this world; the man 
who knows that he is one with God has within himself 
the assurance and the foretaste of the life eternal. His 
soul is dwelling in a sweet serenity that no shocks of 
trouble can dusturb. Neither life nor death, nor things 
present nor things to come can separate him from the 
love of God. 

And not only is he at peace with himself and with 
his God; he must also be at peace with all his fel- 
lows, or if between himself and them there is any lack of 
harmony, it is because they are out of harmony with God. 
It is evident, indeed, that in a world as disordered by 
selfishness and sin as this world now is, there cannot be 
perfect peace. Jesus himself once said, "I came not to 
bring peace but a sword." "Blessed are ye," he cries, 
"when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall 
say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake." 
The full value of that beatitude we are sometimes, in 
our impatience, slow to accept. Those who stand with 
him in their fidelity to his truth, must sometimes share 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 101 

with him the spite and malignity of selfish men, the 
buffet and the scourge and the crown of thorns. The 
social peace of heaven may often be imperfectly realized 
in this world. In the heart of him who has the mind of 
the spirit there is peace, and he is one of the sons of 
peace; the spirit of peace is with him, the wish and tne 
longing to be at one with all men; but he knows that 
there can be no enduring peace without righteousness ; 
and he will never sacrifice righteousness for peace ; he 
does not forget the command to seek first the Kingdom 
of God and his righteousness. But when all men possess 
the same mind, then there will be peace on earth. When 
all men are one with God in his thought concerning 
themselves and their fellows, then there will be perfect 
peace. Minds that agree with the Perfect Mind must 
agree with one another. Clocks that tally with the reg- 
ulator strike the hour in unison. Instruments that are 
tuned up to concert pitch can join in the symphony. 
Hearts that beat responsive to the love of heaven will 
make harmony on the earth. When all men have the 
mind of the spirit, white- winged peace will descend and 
abide with us. It is evident that when each of us is 
thinking God's thought concerning his brother, there 
can be no discord among us, but only the most joyful 
ministry of sympathy and service. The society organized 
upon that basis will be heaven. Where it will be is an 
irrelevant and childish question. 

And now what is it we mean when we speak that 
awful word which is always coupled with heaven as its 
antithesis? I think that as the substance of heaven is 
harmonv with God so the substance of hell is alienation 



102 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



from and enmity against God. And as the condition 
which Paul calls the mind of the spirit is unity with 
God, so the condition which he describes as the mind 
of the flesh is opposition to him. Those two tendencies 
in man of which Paul speaks so strongly in the seventh 
chapter of the Romans, the law of the mind or spirit 
and the law of the members, are the beginnings of 
heaven and hell. There are impulses within us which 
we distinguish as better and worse; those which lift us 
toward truth, purity, love, honor, integrity, those which 
pull us down toward base self-indulgence, and falsity 
and dishonor and uncleanness, and degradation. Now, 
if we have any immediate and certain knowledge of God 
we know him as the prompter and inspirer and reformer 
of these higher impulses. When these speak within us it 
is God that is speaking; it is his Spirit witnessing to our 
spirits that we are his children and summoning us to 
cleanse our thoughts. And when we stifle these higher 
voices, and yield to the solicitation of our baser nature, 
as we have the power to do, we are fighting against God. 
The mind of the flesh is enmity against God. Every one 
of -you knows what it is to have this conflict in the heart 
between the higher and the lower nature, between the 
impulses which you know to be the best part of you, and 
the impulses which you know to be the worst part of 
you. And every one of you knows what it is to yield 
to the baser nature, to sink down to a lower plane of 
thought and action. Now, Paul says that the mind of 
the flesh is not only enmity against God, he says also 
that it is death. Of course, what he means is spiritual 
death. If our spiritual life depends upon union and 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 103 

fellowship with God, then separation and opposition to 
him must mean spiritual death. The branch, separated 
from the vine, withers and perishes. This is spiritual 
death, the decay of the better and nobler powers, the 
strengthening of the baser tendencies, the gravitation 
of the soul toward brutishness. 

Of course, the soul that is under the dominion of its 
own worse passions cannot be at peace; it must be al- 
ways at strife within itself, it is its own worst enemey 
and knows it; the law of the members is bringing it 
into a degrading servitude, and the chains are galling. 
Most of you, I dare say, know something about this. 
The restlessness, the shame, the irritation, the sense of 
degradation, which are the inevitable consequences of 
conduct which you know to be wrong, which violates 
your own ideals of manliness or womanliness, — you 
know what it is. This is the beginning of hell. This 
is the substance of hell. Multiply this, increase it, till 
it comes to occupy your mind, till it fills, like a cloudy 
pall, the whole firmament of your thought, and you will 
know what is the doom of the transgressor. I have 
known more than one man in my life to whom this tor- 
ment had already become no light matter; who needed 
no revelation to convince him of the reality of hell. 

But even as the felicity of the heavenly life cannot 
be wholly realized by any solitary saint, because it is in 
our social relations that life and happiness are perfected, 
so the full misery of the life of doom cannot be tasted, 
until the bad soul finds itself incorporated into a bad 
society, wherein all like itself are self-centered, egotis- 
tic, brutal, each pursuing his own base gratifications with 



104 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

utter disregard for the welfare of all the rest ; all using 
one another as the instruments of greed and unrighteous- 
ness, and grovelling desires. The hate, the envy, the 
jealousy, the cynicism of such an aggregation — for I 
will not call it a society — can be clearly conceived. You 
might say that such people would not stay together ; that 
their tempers would drive them apart, into isolation, and 
that seems probable, on a superficial view ; but I appre- 
hend that they would be impelled, by a kind of fatality, 
to congregate. Even misery loves company, and the co- 
hesive power of mutual plunder would hurl them to- 
gether. 

Add this ingredient of chronic malevolence and an- 
tipathy, with the reaction of bitterness which is evidently 
entails, to the shame and remorse of the soul that is sink- 
ing by the weight of its own evil doing, — and you have 
a condition whose horror I will not try to characterize. 

I should like to give you one or two pictures of a 
soul in hell. I will not go to Milton or to Dante to find 
them; what they show us is too largely symbolic; I 
would rather give you the bare reality. You remember, 
some of you, John Barclay, in William Allen White's 
story of "A Certain Rich Man." I will not stop to ex- 
plain; if you have not read the story you will get some 
sense of the meaning: 

"Day after day, until the days and nights became 
a week, and the week repeated itself until nearly a month 
was gone, John Barclay, dry-eyed and all but dumb, 
paced the terrace before his house by night, and by day 
roamed through the noisy mill or wandered through the 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 105 

desolate house seeking peace that would not come to 
him. The whole foundation of his scheme of life was 
crumbling beneath him. He had built thirty-five years 
of his manhood on the theory that the human brain is 
the god of things as they are and as they must be. The 
structure, of his life was an imposing edifice and men 
called it great and successful. Yet as he walked his 
lonely way in those black days that followed Jane's 
death, there came into his consciousness a strong, over- 
mastering conviction which he dared not accept, that his 
house was built on sand. For here were things outside 
of his plans, outside of his very beliefs, coming into his 
life, bringing calamity, sorrow and tragedy with them 
into his own circle of friends, into his own household, 
into his own heart. As he walked through the dull, 
lonely house, he could not escape the vague feeling, 
though he fought it as one mad fights for his delusion, 
that all the tragedies piling up about him came from his 
own mistakes. Over and over again he threshed out the 
past. Molly Brownwell's cry, 'You have sold me into 
bondage, John Barclay,' would not be stilled, though 
at times he could smile at it; and the broken body and 
shamed face of her father haunted him, like an obses- 
sion. Night after night when he tried to sleep, Robert 
Hendricks' letter burned in fire before his eyes, and at 
last, so mad was the struggle in his soul, that he hugged 
these to him, that he might escape the greater horror — 
the dreadful red head-lines in the sensational paper they 
had sent him from the city office which screamed at 
him: 'J onn Barclay slays his wife — Aids a water- 



106 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



franchise grab that feeds the people typhoid fever germs, 
and his own wife dies of the fever.' He had burned 
the paper but the headlines were seared into his brain. 

"Over and over he climbed the fiery ladder of his 
sins; the death of General Hendricks, the sacrfice of 
Molly Culpepper, the temptation and fall of his father, 
the death of his boyhood's friend, and then the headlines. 
These things were laid at his door, and over and over 
again, like Sisyphus rolling the stones up hill, he 
swept them away from his threshold, only to find that 
they rolled right back again. And with them came at 
times the suspicion that his daughter's unhappiness w r as 
upon him also. And besides these things, a hundred 
business transactions wherein he had cheated and lied 
for money rose to disturb him. And through it all, 
through his anguish and shame, the faith of his life [his 
faith in the supremacy of self] kept battling for its do- 
minion." 

John Barclay was in hell, no doubt about that. 
Right there in that stately and sumptious home of his, 
with all the comforts that could be had for money, able 
to buy a railroad a thousand miles long the next day, 
his name an open sesame in all the banks in the country, 
he was in hell, a deeper and a hotter hell than Milton 
ever saw or Dante ever dreamed. 

And there are hundreds of thousands of other peo- 
ple in this country today, not in the story books, but in 
the counting rooms and the offices and the parlors, in 
the theaters, on the race-tracks, at the watering places, 
in the shops, in the schools, who are in hell — not just 
such a hell as John Barclay's, for each man digs his 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 107 

own, and furnishes the fuel for its fires — but a hell 
whose torments need no re-enforcements of fire and 
brimstone. 

Then there are the reactions which arise out of the 
perversion of our social nature. Bad men make a bad 
society, and the more there are of them the worse are 
the discords and confusions. By the supposition each 
is bent on getting all he can for himself ; every other man 
is a rival and an enemy. In such an aggregation there 
can be nothing but strife and scathe and havoc. 

Milton's picture of the conference of the devils in 
the bottomless pit is utterly at war with psychology. He 
represents them as holding together by a kind of de- 
spairing loyalty, as even exhibiting some large magnan- 
imities in their dealings with each other. The comment 
has often been made upon Paradise Lost that Satan is 
represented in it as possessing many admirable qualities. 
And after this conclave of the demons results in a unani- 
mous decision respecting the policy of the lost souls the 
poet thus moralizes : 

"O shame to men! Devil with devil damned 
Firm concord holds ; men only disagree 
Of creatures rational, though under hope 
Of heavenly grace; and, God proclaiming peace, 
Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife 
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars 
Wasting the earth, each other to destroy." 

But it is only Milton's devils who behave like this ; 
the real ones, all those in whom selfishness has done its 
perfect work, are quite unable to establish among them- 
selves such "firm concord." The very principle of their 



108 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY 



life is antagonism, and its fruit can be nothing but bit- 
nerness and wrath and misery. 

It would be hard to find any group of human be- 
ings among whom the spirit that makes hell holds undi- 
vided sway, but some'times we find] social conditions 
which give us a glimpse of dire possibilities. Such a 
company as Mr. Jerome gets together in his story and 
play, "The Passing of the Third Floor Back," suggests 
to us the kind of thing which might come to pass when 
unrelieved egoism was the only law of life. 

We see, also, sometimes, in the strife of classes, 
symptoms of what might be, if every man's hand was 
always against his neighbor. In a strike, for example, 
the bitterness, the hatred, the sinister tempers that find 
expression in brutal and revolting deeds, give us some 
inkling of hell. It is far from being an adequate rep- 
resentation, for here are groups bound together by firm 
loyalties, and there is much of tenderness and truth and 
self-denying love; but the violent rupture of even one 
relation by the operation of self-will gives an intimation 
of what chaos would result if all social relations were 
thus torn asunder. 

But heaven, let us not forget, is a reality as con- 
crete and as substantial as hell. If there are many who 
could say with Satan, 

"Which way I fly in hell; myself am hell," 

there are many others who bear about in their hearts, 
often, if not always, the peace, the serenity, the blessed- 
ness of heaven. There have been some known to all of 
us upon whom has descended the spirit which brings 



heaven and hell. 109 

heaven to earth ; whose lives give proof that their prayer, 
which they have been wont to pray, has been answered: 

"I ask thee for a thoughtful love, 

Through constant watching wise, 
To meet the glad with joyful smiles, 

And to wipe the weeping eyes, 
And a heart at leisure from itself, 

To soothe and sympathize." 

Our best proof of a future heaven is in the lives of 
some that we have known upon the earth. To such life, 
we feel, belongs the glory of going on. 

"All those clear souls whose shining face 

Made beauty whensoe'er they came, 
Hearts full of tenderest love and grace 

For truth and right a glorious flame, 
And those whom beauty's perfect round 

Enticed away with glowing heart, — 
Or who in lowly service found 

With silent joy the better part — " 

when we think of them we cannot call them dead; 
we say of them in our hearts what Peter said of his 
Master : it is not possible that such life should be holden 
of death. The substance of heaven, the brightness and 
glory of heaven shone upon our path when they were 
walking by our side. 

And not only have we seen the light of heaven shin- 
ing from the faces of our neighbors, we have seen its 
soft radiance diffused in companies and groups that 
dwelt together in unity, in the spirit of mutual helpful- 
ness, bearing one another's burdens, "having the same 
love, being of one accord, of one mind ; doing nothing 



110 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

through faction or vain glory, but in lowliness of mind 
each counting others better than himself; not looking 
each to his own things only, but each also to the things 
of others." Every one of us knows of homes, pervaded 
by this life; and sometimes when we are sojourning in 
them we think of the words of Jesus, "In my Father's 
house are many mansions," and say to ourselves with 
swelling hearts: "Yes, thank God! and here is one of 
them. The substance of heaven is here. There will be 
nothing better than this, anywhere." 

You will all admit that the essential heaven and the 
essential hell which I have been trying to show you are 
not fables nor imaginations; that they are realities just 
as certain as the multiplication table. The fact that 
the mind that is in harmony with God, and that is 
steadily bent on realizing its own highest impulses is at 
peace with itself, at peace with the world, and at peace 
with God; and that a society composed of such minds 
would be Paradise regained — this is not a vision out of 
a book ; you know enough of human nature to know that 
this must be. The world and man are made to find per- 
fection and blessedness in such life as this. And they 
are made so that the refusal of this life must bring deg- 
radation and misery to the soul and anarchy and chaos 
to society. This is the nature of things. It requires no 
forensic trial, no literal judgment bar, no ranging of 
the sheep and the goats, no stern decree; that is a par- 
able and it is very instructive, if we take it for a par- 
able; but the everlasting fact is that the issues of every 
day are in themselves decisive ; and it is our own choices, 
our own actions that send us, unerringly to the right 



HEAVEN AND HELL. Ill 

hand or to the left. Heaven and hell are already begun 
in us ; in many of us they are contending for the mastery, 
and it seems not certain yet with all of us whether the 
angels or the demons will win. The only sure thing 
about it is that the realm belongs to the angels; the de- 
mons are usurping powers. It is the divine elements in 
our constitution that are the native elements; it is with 
these that the Father of spirits seeks to join himself for 
our deliverance, and yet we often weakly and wickedly 
surrender to the baser elements ; the demons gain the vic- 
tory for a season, at least, and the principalities and 
powers of darkness set up their dominions in our lives. 
So it is that in many lives the powers of hell are strug- 
gling with the powers of heaven. Here within the mi- 
crocosm of the individual soul, the substance of the heaven 
that all holy souls are longing and striving for, and the 
substance of the hell that all generous natures fear and 
dread stand revealed to consciousness; and the glory of 
the one allures us, and the woe of the other warns us. 
There is not one of us who does not know something of 
both; not one to whom the freedom and the beauty and 
the immortal vigor of that upper realm has not 
sometimes been shown in ravishing vision; not one who 
has not felt the whips and scorpions and the clanking 
chains of that nether world. 

One or the other of these tendencies will have the 
mastery, sooner or later, in your life and mine. Do you 
remember what Mr. Lincoln said in that first great 
speech of his, in the State Capitol at Springfield, at the 
opening of his debate with Douglas? " 'A house divided 
against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government 



112 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I 
do not expect the union to be dissolved, — I do not ex- 
pect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to 
be divided. It will become all slave or all free." That 
is just as true of your life and mine. It cannot endure, 
permanently, in a condition of mortal conflict between 
the good and the evil. One side or the other will win. 
The conflict will go on, until the good or the evil is vic- 
torious. When will that issue be decided? I do not 
know. There are those who say that it must be decided 
one way or the other before death, but there is no clear 
Scripture for that, and I am not prepared to affirm it. 
I do not know but that it is practically decided for a 
good many before death; that is to say, the one or the 
other tendency has grown so strong that it is morally 
certain to persist. I know a good many men and women 
who seem to me so established in goodness that no in- 
fluence strong enough to shake them is likely to assail 
them. And I know some who are so thoroughly in- 
trentched in greed, in miserhood, in animalism, that 
there seems to be little hops of rescuing them. This is 
the sublime and inspiring fact — the awful and forbid- 
ding fact — that character tends to permanence. One 
way or the other it will go, more and more strongly, 
with every one of us; one way or the other, by and by, 
it will stay ! 

Do I mean to say that there will be an endless di- 
vision in the world to come between the evil and the 
good? No, I do not believe that. I do not believe that 
evil can be permanent. I do not believe that there will 
be everlasting rebellion against God in the universe. I 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 113 

do not believe that suffering and misery and sin are 
endless. In an everlasting fire I do believe — in the 
thing which that symbolizes, — a fire that consumes in- 
iquity; that is part of the nature of God; our God is a 
consuming fire ; it is part of the nature of things ; but 
the time will come when there will be no food for that 
flame, when Death and Hell themselves shall be cast 
into the lake of fire. The glory of going on belongs to 
goodness ; it does not belong to evil. The tendency of 
sin is to the diminuition of being. Sin — the violation 
of the law of the organism — always lessens life, reduces 
power, tends to dissolution. I believe that persistent 
sin must finally result in the extinction of being. This 
law of the universe is the consuming fire in which all 
the evil of the universe will at last be destroyed. 

The laws of retribution are from everlasting ; they 
must be, if God is love; for he loves us too well to let 
us be comfortable and happy in sin; but evil is in its 
nature temporary and mortal, and the victory of good 
will at last be complete and eternal. 

How this shall be is not, to my mind, entirely clear. 
It must come about in one of two ways. 

Evil may come to an end through the final restora- 
tion to virtue of all wandering and sinning souls, or it 
may cease through the sinking into non-existence of the 
disobedient and the incorrigible. I hope for the recovery 
of all; with Tennyson I cry: 

"0 yet we trust that somehow good 

Will be the final goal of ill, 

To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt and taints of blood: 



114 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

"That nothing walks with aimless feet; 

That not one life shall be destroyed, 

Or cast as rubbish to the void. 
When God hath made the pile complete." 

But the law which we have found in operation, 
that sin brings not only suffering, but diminution of be- 
ing; that the violation by any organism of its organic 
law means the impairment of its life, and that a con- 
tinuation of such violation must mean the extinction of 
life, — makes it impossible for me to dogmatize. It 
looks as though it might be possible for the soul to com- 
mit slow suicide. But this is a dreadful thought \ I can- 
not entertain it without raising troublesome questions 
about the divine administration. Therefore, I cannot 
dogmatize about this. The only thing of w T hich I feel 
sure is that "good will be the final goal of ill;" that 
either through the final reclamation of all, or through 
the fading into nothingness of the incorrigible, rebellion 
and misery will disappear from the universe; that if 
there shall be any whom infinite love cannot restore, 
they will sink into painless silence and oblivion; that, 
in Milton's great words: 

"Leprous sin will melt from earthly mould, 

And Hell itself will pass away, 

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day." 

Let me sum up, now, in brief paragraphs, a few 
of the things which it may be well for us to remember, 
about heaven and hell. 

First, then, it should be clear to us that the descrip- 
tions in the Bible about which our thoughts have been 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 



115 



wont to gather are not topographical. Heaven is not a 
city fifteen hundred miles long, fifteen hundred miles 
wide and fifteen hundred miles high, with streets of gold 
and whole pearls for gates. Hell is not a lake of fire 
and brimstone. These are not descriptions, they are 
symbols. 

Heaven and hell are not, primarily, places, they are 
states of character. 

They are not confined to the other side of death; 
they are here and now. 

They are not figures of speech; they are present 
realities of human experience. Where good will rules 
there is heaven; where selfiishness is regnant there is 
hell. Good will and selfishness are not figures of 
speech; they are realities, as well known to us as hunger 
and cold, as hope and fear. 

If you never know anything of heaven before you 
die, it may take you a good while to find it after death; 
for heaven must be begun in you before you can enter 
into it. 

Death is not regeneration. There is no magic in the 
article of death by which some are changed to angels 
and others to demons. Unquestionably many of us are 
looking for some such sudden transformation of char- 
acter. I know no reason for expecting any such thing. 
Probably we shall enter upon the next life with about 
the same outfit of habit and motive and tendency as that 
with which we leave this life. Probably we shall go, as 
the Scripture says, each to his own place; that is, we 
shall find the associations and occupations that are con- 
genial. If we have learned to live the heavenly life 



116 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



here — the life whose ruling motive is friendship with 
God and men — we shall go on living it there ; if we 
have been living in this world the self-centered life, the 
life which produces hell, we shall continue to live that 
life in the next world and shall find such employments 
and associations as naturally gather about that kind of 
life. We live that kind of life here because we think 
it is the best kind of life; we shall go on living it there 
for the same reason. 

No one lives in hell, in this world, unless he pre- 
fers it. The invitations to the heavenly life are always 
sounding in his ears ; it is always possible for him to 
choose the life of good-will ; why does he not choose it ? 
Because he does not believe the word of Jesus. He 
thinks that "Every man for himself" is a better rule, 
for him, than the Golden Rule. To follow in the way 
of Jesus might involve some heavy sacrifice of things 
that he does not wish to part with. 

John Barclay got out of hell by burning in his 
grate seventy millions of bonds, all fictitious capital, 
whose possession enabled him to levy tribute on the labor 
of a continent, whose cancellation lifted a heavy burden 
from the shoulders of the men who toil. It was a great 
act of restitution. It was the crucifixion of his selfish- 
ness. It broke the chains of a deadly bondage. It let 
him out into the liberty with which Christ makes men 
free. 

Would you have paid that price to get out of hell? 
Would you have sacrificed an annual income of three or 
four millions of dollars, and gone back to the task of 
daily labor to save your soul from the torment and the 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 



117 



degradation which he was suffering? Many people 
wouldn't. They would keep the money, "to do good 
with," probably. They would stifle the cries of remorse. 
They would smother the sense of shame and humiliation. 
Thereafter, the reactions of their moral nature against 
conscious injustice would grow feebler. Gradually their 
consciences would be seared as with a hot iron. They 
would sink from that hell where remorse scorches to 
that deeper hell where conscience is paralyzed, and men 
have learned to say, "Evil be thou my good!" 

The people who stay in hell, this side the grave, are 
not shut in. There is no prison house in which they are 
confined. I do not believe that there is any prison house 
on the other side of the grave, into which God shuts 
men. Hell, in every feature and phase of it, in this 
world and in all worlds, is the natural consequence of 
our own conduct, the natural fruit of our own doings. 
We dig the pit, we forge the chains, we kindle the fires. 

If this is true, some of you are saying, we can es- 
cape from it whenever we will. Can you? Why doesn't 
the drunkard break from his bondage? It isn't God's 
will that enslaves him. Why doesn't the miser climb out 
of his sordid pit? God isn't holding him down. 

"Though God be good and free be heaven, 

No force divine can love compel, 

And though the song of sins forgiven 

May sound through lowest hell, 

"The sweet persuasion of His voice 
Respects thy sanctity of will; 
He giveth day : thou hast thy choice 
To walk in darkness still,. 



118 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

"No word of doom may shut thee out, 

No wind of wrath may downward whirl, 
No sword of fire keep watch about 
The open gates of pearl : 

"Forever round the mercy seat 

The guiding lights of love may burn; 
But what if, habit bound, thy feet 
Shall lack the will to turn ? 

"What if thine eye refuse to see, 

Thine ear of Heaven's free welcome fail, 
And thou a willing captive be, 
Thyself thy own dark jail? 

"O doom beyond the saddest guess, 
As the long years of God unroll, 
To make thy dreary selfishness 
The prison of a soul !" 

That is the only power that enslaves souls, in any 
world. God is not their jailer. And what multitudes 
spend their lives in weaving the toils of selfishness and 
sordid habit and vicious indulgence with which their 
own wills are bound, until their wills are impotent. 
They can escape, if they will, but where is the will? 

This is the substance of what the present day the- 
ology has to say about hell. It is somewhat less lurid 
than some representations you have heard; is it any less 
convincing? 

But let us not forget that while it makes hell very 
near and very real, it brings heaven also to the threshold 
of our choice. Its word to all the children of men is the 
word of the great apostle, "Say not in thy heart, who 
shall ascend up into heaven? or who shall descend into 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 



119 



the abyss? the word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and 
in thy heart." All that makes heaven dear is 

"Closer to us than breathing and nearer than hands or 
feet." 

The poet says that "Heaven lies about us in our 
infancy;" yes, and if we keep the simple faith of little 
children it never goes away from us. What is it that he 
saith? "If a man love me he will keep my word, and my 
Father will love him, and we will come unto him and 
make our abode with him." How far away will heaven 
be when that happens? O how puny and crippled is 
the faith that shuts heaven out of the days when we need 
it most, and out of the places that are aching for its 
peace and rest ! If any man asks you the way to heaven 
show him his own front door. That is the likeliest place 
in the universe to look for it, and if he will search for 
it with all his heart he will find it there. 

What is that prayer we are always praying: "Thy 
kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in 
heaven." Do you mean anything by that prayer when 
you pray it? What else can you mean but that heaven 
is coming to earth? The Revelator saw, in his vision, 
the answer to that prayer, the Holy City descending out 
of heaven from God to fill the earth. It is coming; it 
is coming every day, but not so fast as we could wish. 
What delays its coming? Nothing but the selfishness of 
human hearts. Nothing but our lack of faith in the 
word of Jesus. Just as soon as the children of men can 
learn to believe that the way of love is the way of life 
heaven will be here. 



120 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

The thing we have been praying for will come to 
pass one of these days, for men will begin to believe 
in it and look for it. People will be living in heaven 
right here in the Scioto Valley. Not in palaces, but in 
beautiful homes; not within walls but on streets that 
stretch away into sweet fields, and link earth's plenty 
with man's need. The pavements will not be golden, 
but they will be clean and whole, and the river of life 
will be our own river, flowing not past prison walls, but 
through green groves and flowers, with trees of life on 
either side, and children playing in the sunshine. It 
will be lighted, too, with a radiance which will make our 
clusters pale, for the glory of God will lighten it, and the 
lamp thereof will be the Lamb. God's great love, which 
is the greater glory, will be the law of its life; and the 
gentleness and peace of Christ will abide in all its as- 
semblies. All this is coming, one of these days, to the 
place where we stand, to the city where we live. It 
would come to-night, with power and great glory, if the 
children of men could only believe — believe — believe 
the simple truth that the way of Jesus is the way of life. 



VI. 

THE INCARNATION. 

(121) 



"Why, what's the need of Temple, when the walls 
O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls 
From Levite's choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls? 

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my universe that feels and knows !" 

Robert Browning. 



"Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest holiest manhood thou ; 
Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours to make them thine." 
Alfred Tennyson. 



"But lead me, Man Divine, 
Where'er Thou will'st, only that I may find 
At the long journey's end thine image there, 
And grow more like "to it. For art not Thou 
The human shadow of the infinite Love 
That made and fills the infinite universe?" 
Robert Watson Gilder. 

(122) 



VI. 

THE INCARNATION. 

WE are to consider tonight the central question 
of our religion, the question respecting the 
character of its Founder. We call ourselves 
Christians and this implies that we are the disciples and 
followers of Jesus Christ. The question who he was, 
and what we ought to think about Him, is one to which 
every disciple of his ought to be able to give an intelli- 
gent answer. 

Jesus is reported by Matthew as asking the Scribes 
on one occasion, "What think ye of Christ?" That is 
the way the question stands in the old version. It would 
seem to the superficial reader to be a challenge to them 
to give him their estimate of himself. But that was not 
the precise force of the question. "Christ" is the Greek 
form of the Hebrew Messiah, and the question put to 
these Jewish thelogians was, "What is your opinion 
about the Messiah, for whom you are looking? Whose 
son is he to be?" They did not give the title Christ to 
the man Jesus, and he was not assuming that they 
would; he was simply trying to draw out their ideas 
about the origin of their Messiah. But we do give the 
title "Christ," which means King, to the man Jesus; 
most of us use the title, when we speak of him, oftener 
than we use the name; and if he should put the ques- 
tion to us, as it stands in the old version, it would mean, 

(123) 



124 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



to most of us, "What do you think of me?" That is the 
question which I desire this evening reverently to answer. 
How many different answers have been given to 
this question in all the ages of the church! It is often 
assumed that the teaching of the Christian church 
through all the centuries on these great themes has been, 
uniform. One of the groundless pretensions often set 
forth by apologists is that orthodoxy is that which has 
been believed "always, everywhere, and by all." But 
there is no statement in the oldest of the creeds of which 
anything like this is true. The history of doctrine is a 
record of constant changes in the forms of belief. Har- 
nack has filled seven octavo volumes with the phases of 
theological development. People sing fervently: 

"It's the old time religion, 
And it's good enough for me;" 

meaning, by that, generally, the old time doctrine; but 
if any one should ask them if they mean all the old 
time doctrines, and they should answer that they did, 
they would find themselves encumbered with reams and 
bales of theological rubbish, of which it would be diffi- 
cult to make any definite use. 

The doctrine of the person of Christ is one of the 
chief battlegrounds of theology. Through all the gen- 
erations the thelogians have been explaining him; and 
there are thousands, probably tens of thousands of vol- 
umes, in all the languages of Christendom in which these 
explanations are set forth. The fiercest controversies of 
the ages ihave been fought over these definitions 'of 
Christ. "In the course of this controversy," says Har- 



THE INCARNATION. 



125 



nack, "men put an end to brotherly fellowship for the 
sake of a nuance; and thousands were cast out, con- 
demned, loaded with chains and done to death. It is a 
gruesome story. On the question of 'Christology' men 
beat their religious doctrines into terrible weapons and 
spread fear and intimidation everywhere. This attitude 
still continues ; Christology is treated as though the gospel 
had no other problem to offer, and the accompanying 
fanaticism is still rampant in our own day."* These 
are not figures of speech; they are quite exact and lib- 
eral reports of what has been going on through all the 
Christian centuries. Men have been exiled, imprisoned, 
gibbeted for not holding right theories of the person of 
Jesus Christ. Armies have been raised to ravage the 
fields and burn the cities of those whose belief concern- 
ing him was supposed to be incorrect. Servetus was 
burned to death at Geneva because his opinions con- 
cerning the person of Christ were regarded as heretical. 
How strange it seems that he who came to bring peace 
to earth and good will to men should be the subject of 
such fierce contentions ! How little do the men know 
of Jesus Christ who think that their loyalty to him re- 
quires them to hurl hot words of hate and scorn at all 
whose opinions about him differ from their own! 

When we look back at the theories which men have 
held concerning him, and observe how far apart and 
how contradictory they are it becomes evident that there 
must have been a great deal of confusion in their 
thoughts. It has always been believed that he was in 
some way a link between humanity and divinity; but 
*"What is Christianity ?" p. 125. 



126 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

just how the human and the divine natures were united 
in him it has not been easy to explain. There was a 
sect in the early church which maintained that Jesus 
was in no sense a man; that his body was not a real 
body but a visionary appearance — a kind of apparation 
by which men's eyes were deceived. These people 
thought that the flesh was the seat of all evil ; that mat- 
ter was essentially vile, and that therefore no divine 
being could have any contact with it. The act of de- 
ception by which the divine person passed himself off as 
human these pious theologians seemed to find no diffi- 
culty in reconciling with their nations of deity. 

At the opposite pole from these were the sects that 
denied to the man Jesus any divine character whatever. 
While holding that God and man are contrasted natures, 
they have maintained that the man of Nazareth was 
wholly human and could therefore be in no wise a par- 
taker of the divine nature. They were ready to agree 
that this man had been raised by God to divine honors, 
so that he should be worshipped; but this was purely a 
political act of the divine government, so to speak; and 
the nature of the being thus exalted was not changed 
thereby. 

About the middle of the fifth century the Council 
of Chalcidon formulated the theory which has since been 
held by many Christians to be the orthodox theory — 
which affirms "the union in the person of Christ of two 
complete and distinct natures, one divine and one human 
each retaining after the union 'without confusion or 
change* the same properties which it possessed before." 
Thus a divine nature and a human nature are bound to- 



THE INCARNATION. 127 

gether in one person, not blended and interfused but 
kept distinct and separate. It is a difficult thing to con- 
ceive, and has always been a subject of controversy. 
Among Protestants, this debate has been raging for cen- 
turies. The Lutherans hold that in the union of the two 
natures the human is practically submerged, and that 
the consciousness of Christ is therefore essentially a di- 
vine consciousness — that he always know T s himself to be 
omnipotent and omniscient; while the Calvinists insist 
on keeping the distinction sharp between the two natures 
and the psychological difficulties are solved, as Dr. Brown 
tells us, ''by the hypothesis of an alternating conscious- 
ness, now divine and now human." Which of these 
theories is it necesary to believe in order to be orthodox? 
You cannot believe them both. 

Such are some of the metaphysical puzzles with 
which this subject has been invested. They all start in 
the realm of abstractions with the notion that some kind 
of a philosophical scheme must be framed into which 
this historical person can be fitted. That is the old way 
of explaining the universe — think out your theories first 
and make your facts conform to them. Of course, these 
theories are all man-made; every dogma is as truly a 
human product as is a wagon or a clock. And of late 
years this theory of a dual personality has fallen more 
and more into the background. It raises so many more 
difficulties than it solves, that intelligent theologians 
have ceased to insist upon it. 

The changes which have taken place in the con- 
ception of the person of Jesus Christ are due largely to 
this fact, that God and man are, by modern thinkers, 



128 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

no longer regarded as contrasted natures. The difficulty 
with the old theories, as Dr. Brown tells us, arose from 
that great gulf which they placed between humanity and 
divinity. "Regarding God and man," he says, "as mu- 
tually exclusive terms [the old theology] is forced to con- 
ceive of the incarnation as a stupendous miracle, involv- 
ing the union in a single person of two sets of mutually 
contradictory attitudes." But when men begin to think 
of God as immanent in creation, — as revealing himself 
in the order and beauty of the universe, as the indwelling 
life of the world, as coming to the fullness of his man- 
ifestation in humanity, — that old dualism sinks out of 
sight. It is simply impossible for those who have come 
to believe in the presence of God in his world, to express 
their faith any longer in the terms of the old creeds. 

Consequently the modern theologians begin their 
investigation of this transcendent theme not among the 
clouds, but on the earth. Instead of starting with specu- 
lation they start with history. Instead of figuring out 
a scheme by which the Absolute can enter into human 
relations, they begin with the known, and find their way 
through it to the unknown; they begin with the human 
Christ, and through his humanity approach his divinity. 
"The true humanity of Jesus," says Dr. Brown, "has 
always been a fundamental article of Christian faith." 
Theoretically it has ; practically it has been greatly ob- 
scured. For a great many centuries it has been virtually 
denied. The emphasis has all been put upon his deity, 
and his true humanity has been ignored. Dante's pic- 
ture of Christ in "Purgatorio" gives us the notion of him 
which was really prevalent in the popular mediaeval 



THE INCARNATION. 



129 



theology — a figure with the body of a lion and the head 
and wings of an eagle. Such a grotesque monstrosity 
Dante found when he was looking for Christ. The Son 
of man had ceased to be a friend and brother; he had 
become a theological symbol. It was because of this de- 
humanization of him, in a substitutionary theology, that 
the church turned to the worship of Mary. Something 
human the soul demanded in its religious loyalties. God 
was inhuman, as all the theologies proved; Christ had 
become non-human, through their metaphysical and fo- 
rensic manipulations; Mary the mother was still human 
and they clung to her as to one of like passions with 
themselves, whose sympathy they could trust. 

It was because of this sterilization of Christianity 
by the legalisms and fictions of theology that men began 
to go back to Christ himself. The humanity of Jesus, 
they said, is the proper starting point for our study. Let 
us begin with facts that are level to our intelligence 
and find our way through these into the deeper mysteries 
of his being. 

I suppose that the name which represents most fully 
the modern way of thinking about Jesus Christ is that 
of Albrecht Ritschl, the great German theologian who 
died in Gottingen in 1889. Ritschl was in many ways 
a disciple of Schleiermacher, but he thought independ- 
ently and he has left a deep impression on his generation. 
Let me give you briefly, in the words of Dr. William 
Adams Brown, the gist of Ritschl's Christology: 

"According to Ritschl the divinity of Christ is not 
so much a theoretical as a practical conception. * * * 
It expresses the fact that in Jesus of Nazareth his dis- 

9 



130 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



ciples find the ideal of humanity realized, and are con- 
scious, through him, of being brought into contact with 
a power which is able to raise them above the law of 
necessity into the freedom and joy of the Kingdom of 
God. Hence, to the church, Christ has the value of 
God. For God as he is known in religion, means just 
this practical power to help and to deliver. What God 
is in himself we cannot say, and it is futile to inquire. 
Hence any attempt to construct the person of Christ by 
the aid of abstract conceptions like the Absolute, or the 
Logos, which have no basis in experience, is to invite 
failure. The true task of the theologian is to study the 
human Jesus that he may learn from an analysis of his 
life and work, what are the features of his character and 
ministry which gave him his unique power to uplift and 
to transform human life. When we have done this we 
shall have learned how it comes to pass that in him we 
find that practical power to help which we call God." * 
Such are the methods by which the present day the- 
ology undertakes to find out what it ought to think about 
Jesus Christ. It does not go to the councils or the 
creeds or the philosophers. It finds confusion and dark- 
ness in all these speculations. It goes directly to Jesus 
Christ himself, to the record of him which we find in 
the Gospels. It tries to find out what he said, and what 
it means ; what he did and what it signifies ; what he 
suffered, and what it reveals. It hears him calling, 
Come unto me ; take my yoke upon you and learn of me ; 
I am the Way and the Truth and the Life; and it simply 
takes him at his word, and goes to him to listen, to learn, 
* "Outline of Christian Theology," p. 340. 



THE INCARNATION, 131 

to follow. It finds that his Gospel is a practical gospel ; 
that it offers help to overcome sin, help to live the good 
life. That, according to his teaching, is what it is for. 
The present day theology proposes to put this teach- 
ing of Jesus to the test of life. And by this purely 
scientific experiment it verifies his claims. It finds that 
those who open their minds to his teaching and their lives 
to his spirit, who become identified with him in thought 
and feeling, do find peace of mind, strength to resist 
temptation, courage and hope and moral vigor. In short 
they find that fellowship with Jesus brings God into 
their lives, brings into their lives that practical power to 
help and to deliver which we call God. There is no 
speculation about this, it is an actual experience. 

Not only as individuals, but as social groups, they 
find that when they receive him into their midst, when 
they feed upon his truth, when they seek to govern their 
lives by his law and to live together according to his 
way, harmony and peace prevail, and the community is 
the home of welfare and happiness. The historical evi- 
dence of this is not so abundant as it ought to be, for 
this has not been the field in which men have been look- 
ing for the proof of the truth of Christianity; it has 
never been really expected, until very lately, (by the ma- 
jority of Christians), that the religion of Jesus would 
exert any appreciable influence in transforming human 
society. That idea is beginning to dawn upon the minds 
of many Christians, but there are few who have fully 
grasped it, and there are multitudes yet who scout it as 
a delusion and a heresy. Their notion is that the work 
of Christ is to get people safely away from this world 



132 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

to heaven; the idea that this world is being made better 
or can be made better by spiritual and moral agencies 
they scoff at, as contrary to Scripture ; they say that it is 
going to wreck and rottenness as fast as it can, and that 
nothing can be done to arrest its decadence; that our 
only hope is in the return of Jesus in the flesh to earth 
to gather out of the wreck the few faithful ones, and 
take them up into the sky, leaving the rest to sink 
deeper and deeper into degradation and misery until by 
and by Christ will come back again and wipe the whole 
population from the face of the earth in a great con- 
flagration, after which he will set up his throne on the 
earth. That, they say, is what you ought to mean by 
the prayer, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on 
earth as it is in heaven." That is the only way his king- 
dom will ever come. 

Such has been the cheerful belief entertained by 
hosts of Christians in all the centuries. So long as any 
such notion as this was entertained, all expectation of the 
Christianization of human society by methods purely 
moral and spiritual was, of course, very dim. This 
world, lying in wickedness, was to lie and rot. And 
therefore, there has been no courageous and hopeful en- 
deavor to apply to human society, in any large way, the 
transforming power of Christ's gospel. Consequently, 
the proofs of this transforming power are far less plenti- 
ful than they ought to have been, in this twentieth cen- 
tury. Nevertheless, imperfectly as the truth has been 
applied, there is evidence enough that this renovating 
power is in it, and that when the Christian people begin 
to comprehend what their religion is for, and set it to 



THE INCARNATION. 



133 



work in a whole hearted way, it will speedily bring 
heaven to earth. There are facts enough, when they are 
gathered together, to make it clear, that the Social Gos- 
pel has in it the power of God unto salvation. 

This, then, is what the men of the new theology 
find, when they go directly to Jesus Christ and learn 
from him what he proposes to do for men. They find, 
as individuals, that in his fellowship and under his lead- 
ership, they are inspired, uplifted, invigorated, filled with 
the passion of service. They find that the God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ becomes to them their 
Almighty Friend and Helper, and they are able to verify 
the words of Jesus when he said : "If a man love me he 
will keep my word and my Father will love him and 
we will come unto him and make our abode With him." 
They find also in their hearts and in the world about 
them, reasons for an abiding faith that he who said, 
"I came not to judge the world but to save the world," 
is able to do what he said; they are perfectly sure that 
this present world is to be filled with the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God as it shines in the face 
of Jesus Christ, and they are filled with a great and sol- 
emn thankfulness because it is their high privilege to 
have part with him in this great work and to enter into 
the joy of their Lord. 

Speaking for myself, that is what the new theology 
has taught me to think about Jesus Christ. That is 
what it has done for me. I am not ashamed of the 
Gospel of Christ as I understand it, for I know that it 
is the power of God unto salvation, to every one who 
will receive it. 



184 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

What has it done for the church ? For a good many 
it has done nothing, because they are blindly refusing to 
consider it. But some great gains have come to those 
who have eyes to see and ears to hear. I am going to 
let Dr. William Adams Brown tell you something of 
what has been done for the Christian world by this new 
approach to Jesus Christ. 

"First of all, the humanity of Christ has recorded 
its rightful place in Christian thinking. We are no 
longer content to assert it as a doctrine ; we wish to real- 
ize it as a fact. Through the mists of dogma and of 
tradition, under which he has so long been hidden, the 
gracious figure of the Man of Galilee begins again to 
be seen; and as the outlines take on greater and even 
greater distinctness, we are brought more and more un- 
der the spell of his simplicity, his originality, his great- 
ness. We see the environment in which he lived, the quiet 
home at Nazareth, the simple life in the synagogue and 
at the carpenter's bench. We reconstruct the conditions 
of the time, political, social, ecclesiastical. * * * 
In this human world we see Jesus walking as a man 
amongst men; growing in knowledge with growing ex- 
perience; deepening his sympathies by contact with suf- 
fering ; winning men by the charm of unexampled frank- 
ness and simplicity; clothing his teaching with familiar 
imagery taken from the scenes of daily life; going at 
last to a death which was the inevitable result of the 
clash of two great ideals, only to appear again to the 
faith and love of his disciples, and to carry on through 
their devotion a work a thousand-fold greater than it had 



THE INCARNATION. 



135 



been given him to do within the narrow limits of his 
earthly life. 

"We have a better understanding of the Gospel of 
Jesus. The Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of 
man; the worth of the individual human soul, greatness 
through service, salvation through sacrifice, the kingdom 
of God as the goal of humanity — these truths, so inex- 
haustible in their richness and freshness are seen to be his 
peculiar contribution to the religious thought of the race. 
* * * Today, as in each preceding generation, men 
turn to him with wonder and reverence as the supreme 
religious teacher of the race. * * * 

"Greater than his teaching is the character of Jesus. 
Here, too, Christian thought owes a great debt to mod- 
ern scholarship. When Christ in conceived from the 
point of the Absolute it is impossible to appreciate his 
moral greatness. But look upon him as a man of like 
passions and temptations with ourselves, and the full 
majesty of his character makes itself felt. A man who 
could live in the world and do what he did is unique. 
Where did he get his insight? What explains that self- 
mastery unexampled? This only is clear, that the Gos- 
pel and the character of Jesus belong together. He 
could speak of God as he did because he had had expe- 
rience of God in his own soul and knew whereof he 
affirmed. 

"The same causes which have led to a new appre- 
ciation of the character of Jesus have given us a new 
insight into the significance of his claims. Here again 
a frank recognition of tke true humanity of Jesus is the 



186 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

necessary condition of realizing his uniqueness. Hum- 
ble and lowly as he was, clear-eyed and just in his per- 
ception of moral values, frank to recognize the rights 
of the least of his brethren to the same access to God 
which he claimed for himself, he was yet conscious of a 
unique relation to the Father and a unique function in 
mediating them to men. He recognized in Himself 
the center of human history, and looked for a day when 
all men should be gathered into the kingdom of which 
he was the head. This is what the Messiahship of Jesus 
means, an authority spiritualized, transformed, reborn, 
but authority none the less. In proclaiming Jesus as 
Lord the Christian church has made no departure from 
the Gospel of Jesus. 

"Thus it is in Jesus Christ, understanding by the 
term all that we have passed here in review, — life, 
character, authority, gospel, — that we find the distinc- 
tive mark of Christianity. With his supremacy in the 
religious life of humanity, its claim to be the final reli- 
gion stands or falls." * 

This is a long quotation but you could not afford to 
miss any of it. And it seems to show that the Present 
Day Theology has found its way to a very large concep- 
tion of Jesus Christ and his work. But it reached this 
inspiring conviction by the discovery that the great gulf 
which the traditional theology had fixed between man 
and God does not exist ; that the human and the divine 
are not contrasted natures. The fundamental fact is 
that God is our Father and that we are his children. 
He is not only the Former of our bodies, he is the Father 
*The Essence of Christianity/' pp. 298-301. 



THE INCARNATION. 137 

of our spirits. If anything is clear it is that children 
must be of the same nature as their Father. Everything 
that is essentially human is included in the nature of 
God ; everything that is essentially divine is found in the 
nature of man. Divinity is finite in man; humanity is 
infinite in God. "Strictly speaking," says Mr. Camp- 
bell, "the human and the divine are two categories which 
shade into and imply each other; humanity is divinity 
viewed from below, divinity is humanity viewed from 
above. If any human being could succeed in living a 
life of perfect love, that is, a life whose energies were 
directed toward impersonal ends, and which was lived 
in such a way as to be and do the utmost for the whole, 
he would show himself divine, for he would have revealed 
the innermost of God." 

Such a life as this Jesus lived. That is the his- 
torical fact. By living this life he became the most per- 
fect revelation of God to men that it is possible for us 
to conceive. The strong saying of one of the early wit- 
nesses sets forth the truth. "The Life was manifested, 
and we have seen and bear witness and declare unto you 
the Life, the eternal Life which was with the Father and 
was manifested unto us." The life of God was mani- 
fested to men in the life of a man. In no other form 
of manifestation could it have been so fully revealed. 
It is through the human nature that the divine nature 
finds its most perfect expression. Because Jesus was a 
perfect man he shows us the most and the best that we 
can know of God. 

Thus the present day theology puts an end to the 
old dispute about the person of Christ by getting rid 



138 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

of the ancient dualism, which set God and man over 
against each other as opposite poles of thought. This 
dualism was not merely the vice of Orthodox thinking; 
the Liberals were quite as much addicted to it. In the 
popular theology the Orthodox were always saying, Jesus 
is divine, and therefore, he cannot be human in any 
proper sense of the word; his humanity is only a tem- 
porary attachment or appendage. On the other hand, 
the Liberals were always saying, Jesus is human, and 
therefore he cannot be in any proper sense divine. When 
we have once grasped the unitary conception, which 
unites God and man in the terms of a common nature, 
that old dispute is ended. If God is the Father of us 
all, if we are the sons of God there can be no contrariety 
between our nature and his. We have got rid of the 
dualism which insists on putting humanity and deity 
into two separte categories. And Jesus Christ stands 
forth not only as the brightness of the Father's glory 
but as the perfect flower of humanity. The creed makers 
try to set forth this faith in metaphysical terms, but 
the best theologian of them all is the good Quaker poet : 

"We may not climb the heavenly steeps 
To bring the Lord Christ down, 
In vain we search the lowest deeps, 
For Him no depths can drown. 

"But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present help is he, 
And faith has still its Olivet, 
And love its Galilee. 

"The healing of his seamless dress 
Is iby our beds of pain, 



THE INCARNATION. 

We touch Him in life's throng and press 
And we are whole again. 

"Through Him the first fond prayers are said, 
Our lips of childhood frame, 
The last low whispers of our dead 
Are burdened with his name. 

"Our Lord and Master of us all, 

Whate'er our name or sign, 
We own thy sway, we hear thy call, 
We test our lives by thine. 

"To Thee our full humanity, 
Its joys and pains belong; 
The wrong of man to man on Thee 
Inflicts a deeper wrong. 

"Deep strike thy roots, O heavenly vine 
Within our earthly sod, 
Most human and yet most divine, 
The flower of man and God. 

"O Love! O Life! Our faith and light, 
Thy presence maketh one ; 
As, through transfigured clouds of white 
We trace the noon-day sun, 

"So, to our mortal eyes subdued, 
Flesh-veiled, but not concealed; 
We know in thee the fatherhood 
And heart of God revealed. 

"We faintly hear, we dimly see, 

In differing phase we pray, 
But, dim or clear, we own in thee 
The Light, the Truth, the Way. 



139 



140 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

"The homage that we render Thee 
Is still our Father's own, 
No jealous claim or rivalry 
Divides the Cross and Throne." 

Thus we have learned what to think about Jesus 
Christ, not by questioning the philosophers and the dog- 
matists but by going first directly to him, and opening 
our lives to the grace which bringeth salvation, and then 
by believing what he tells us about the Fatherhood of 
God. One who helps us as he helps us, who gives us the 
power to rise from selfishness and animalism into new- 
ness and fullness of life, is entitled to be believed when 
he tells us that the Eternal God is his Father and our 
Father; that he is our Elder Brother; and that He, in 
his self-sacrificing love, is revealing to us the very heart 
of God; that as he loves us so God loves us; that as he 
shares our burdens of pain and woe, so God suffers with 
us and for us to save us from our sins. 

This is the substance of what I believe about Jesus 
Christ. I do not know that I care to put any label on 
my belief; I would rather it should stand on its own 
logic and shine by its own light. Like Mr. Gilder's 
heathen in Galilee, in the year 32, I am ready to say: 

"If Jesus Christ be a man 
And only a man, I say 
That of all mankind I will cleave to him, 
And to him will I cleave alway. 

"If Jesus Christ be a God 

And the only God, I swear, 
I will follow him through heaven and hell 
The earth, the sea and the air." 



THE INCARNATION. l4l 

If I have not made his humanity a glorious fact. 
I have failed in my highest endeavors, but I do not 
think that any of you will say that I have made him 
no more than one of ourselves. More he is — so much 
more that we have no terms in which to express the dif- 
ference; more, but not other; his nature is the same as 
ours; and toward that glorious perfection we are called 
to rise; it is the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. 
"It is impossible," says Reginald Campbell, "to deny 
the uniqueness of Jesus ; history has settled that question 
for us. If all the theologians and naturalists put to- 
gether were to set at work tomorrow to try to show that 
Jesus was just like other people they would not succeed, 
for the civilized world has already made up its mind on 
this point and by a right standard recognizes Jesus as 
the unique standard of human excellence. But this is 
not to say that we shall never reach that standard, too — 
quite the contrary. We must reach it in order to fulfill 
our destiny and crown and complete his work." 

The old theology was a theology of contrasts and 
contrarieties and antagonisms, and therefore, it was con- 
strained in estimating the person of Christ to emphasize 
the theory that in his origin he differed from all the 
rest of humankind. It has thus made the doctrine of the 
virgin birth of Jesus an essential doctrine of orthodoxy. 
It has taught that his life began in a miraculous way; 
that he had a human mother but no human father. I 
have never felt inclined to make this a subject of contro- 
versy. I am not prepared to dogmatize about it. The 
beginning of every conscious life is to me a stupendous 
marvel. I can think of nothing more wonderful than 



142 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



that a free spirit, endowed with thought and affection 
and volition should emerge from nothingness into being. 
There is nothing in biology that explains it. But that 
marvel constantly appears; it is as much beyond my 
power of explanation as is the origin of the universe; 
and since I must accept that, I am not disposed to make 
any very positive assertions about what can and cannot 
be in the beginnings of conscious life. 

On the other hand the Scriptural proofs of the doc- 
trine of the virgin birth are rather dubious. In only two 
of the New Testament books is it referred to. The Gos- 
pel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke contain allusions 
to it. The Gospel of Mark, which is, by all, now ad- 
mitted to be the earliest gospel, and the foundation of 
both Matthew and Luke, does not mention it. The Gos- 
pel of John, which is regarded as the chief proof of 
Christ's divinity, has not heard of it. The Apostle Paul 
who is the author of thirteen of the twenty-eight books 
of the New Testament, never speaks of it. No word 
of Jesus reported in any of the gospels alludes to it. 
There are two genealogies of Jesus, in Matthew and 
Luke, and both of them make Jesus the son of Joseph. 
The story of the virgin birth in Matthew and Luke con- 
tradict each other at several points. There seems, cer- 
tainly, to be much justification for the conclusion of 
many great Christian scholars that the stories in Mat- 
thew and Luke are late legendary additions to these 
gospels. 

It is not disputed that the life of Jesus was sus- 
tained in the same way that our lives are sustained. Food 



THE INCARNATION. 



143 



and drink and sleep and exercise were as needful for 
him as for us. He claimed no exemption from the com- 
mon experience of humanity in the maintenance of his 
life. He would not have been the Savior that he is, if 
he had not shared with us all these human experiences, 
— if he had not known what it was to be hungry and 
cold and weary. And I confess that I should be glad 
to know that he was one with us in the origin of his 
life as well as in the maintenance of it. It seems to me 
that this idea of the virgin birth tends to throw some 
discredit upon the sacredness of marriage, which is a 
tendency to be deprecated. 

At all events I protest against making any man a 
heretic because he believes that Mary told the truth 
when she said to Jesus in the temple, "Thy father and I 
have sought thee sorrowing." The latest and one of the 
most staunchly orthodox of books on the Person of 
Christ, by Dr. Mackintosh, a Scotch Presbyterian, says 
positively: "For my own part I should not think of 
regarding an explicit belief in the virgin birth of our 
Lord as essential to Christian faith; otherwise St. Paul 
was no Christian," and again, "We cannot imagine Christ 
himself insisting on acceptance of the birth narratives 
as a condition or preliminary of personal salvation." 

The truth is that nothing is added to the moral 
greatness of Christ by insisting on this doctrine, and 
nothing subtracted from his essential divinity by the 
belief that he entered the world in a way that God has 
sanctified for all his children; and all disputation about 
the subject is not only unprofitable but unseemly. 



144 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

I trust that this discussion may have brought the 
man Christ Jesus a little closer to your apprehension, — 
may have helped you to see that he is 

"No fable old, nor mythic lore, 
Nor dream of bards and seers, 
No dead fact, stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years," 

but one who is sharing our life, bearing our burdens, 
feeling in his own soul the shame of our sin, and help- 
ing us to escape from it, understanding to the utter- 
most our needs and our limitations, yet strong to bring 
to us all the fullness of the divine compassion and in- 
vigoration and lift us up to newness and nobleness of life. 
And I hope that all these studies may be enabling you 
to see that the men of this generation who are seeking 
to interpret in more rational terms the great facts of the 
Christian gospel are not all the enemies of Christ. If I 
may ask Dr. Brown once more to speak for them, it 
shall be in these words : 

"We have learned from Christ to call [the] Su- 
preme Being Father and to see in his will the expression 
of a character like that of Jesus Christ. For the ab- 
stract Absolute of philosophy we substitute the God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When we confess his 
sovereignty we mean that the principles of Jesus are 
some day to dominate the world. When we speak of the 
Incarnation we mean that in the life of Jesus of Naz- 
areth, simple, human, brotherly as we have learned to 
see it, God is revealing to all who have eyes to see what 



THE INCARNATION. 146 

he himself is like, and what he would fain have all men 
become." 

Yes, and there has never been a day since Jesus was 
lifted up on Calvary when this life of Jesus, simple, 
human, brotherly, held so commanding a place in the 
thoughts and affections of the human race as it holds 
today, never a day when he was speaking through so 
many lips his messages of good will and peace; never 
a day when it was so plain that the way of Jesus is the 
way of life for the world. 



10 



VII. 

THE ATONEMENT. 

(147) 



Love that will not let me go, 
I rest my weary soul in thee; 

1 give thee back the life I owe, 
That in thine ocean depths its flow 

May richer, fuller be. 

Joy that seekest me through pain, 
I cannot close my heart to Thee; 

1 trace the rainbow through the rain, 
And feel the promise is not vain 

That morn shall tearless be. 

Cross, that liftest up my head, 

I dare not ask to fly from Thee; 

1 lay in dust life's glory dead, 

And from the ground there blossoms red 
Life that shall endless be. 

George Matheson. 
(148) 



VII. 

THE ATONEMENT. 

WHAT is the teaching of the Present Day The- 
ology respecting the atonement? The fact 
that thought on this subject is not stationary, 
that it is in motion, is the first thing to note. Should 
we not expect this? What was the purpose of the reve- 
lation that came to men by Jesus Christ? Was it not to 
give men larger knowledge of God and his kingdom in 
the world, and to clarify and elevate their moral judg- 
ments? Should we not expect a marked intellectual and 
moral advancement among the Christian peoples? Un- 
less Christianity is a failure this must have been the re- 
sult. And as the progress of the centuries has been clear- 
ing and enlarging men's moral ideals must they not 
have been learning to see the great truths connected with 
the work of Christ more distinctly? Is it not inevitable 
that their explanations of these facts will change, that 
many childish and heathenish conceptions will be drop- 
ped, that the doctrinal statements about the atonement 
will be modified by enlightened reason and purified com- 
mon sense? This is the thing to be looked for, and his- 
tory abundantly proves that what ought to have been 
expected has come to pass ; that the explanations which 
have been given of the work of Christ have been con- 
stantly changing, and changing for the better, from the 
first Christian centuries until now. 

(149) 



160 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

It has, of course, been believed from the beginning 
that something was done by Jesus Christ to restore men 
to their right relation with God. That men were in some 
way, out of harmony with God, estranged from him, 
afraid of him, was the verdict of universal experience. 
Something needed to be done to bring them into friend- 
ship and unity with him. That this thing which needed 
to be done has been done by Jesus Christ all Christians 
believe; they have only differed when they have tried to 
tell how he has done it. 

For about a thousand years after his death the prin- 
cipal theory held and taught in the church was that the 
work of Christ was a work of ransom or redemption. 
A ransom is the price paid for the release of a captive 
or a prisoner; the reedemer is the one who pays the 
price. The human race, as was explained by this theory, 
had been captured by Satan, through the sin of Adam, 
and was held by him in captivity. The thing necessary 
to be done was to get the race out of the clutches of the 
devil. There was some dispute as to whether the devil 
had a legal right to his prey, but there was no question 
that he had possession of it ; and possession, as the law- 
yers say, is nine points of the law. The "plan of sal- 
vation/' as these old theologians conceived it, consisted 
in God's offering his Son to Satan as a ransom for the 
captive race. Satan accepted the person of the Son of 
God, and put him to death, and thus lost his legal pos- 
session of the human race. 

The old theologians differed much about the details 
of this transaction; many of them maintained that the 
devil was outwitted in it; that he was not aware of the 



THE ATONEMENT. 151 

divine nature of our Lord; he only saw that Jesus was 
his greatest enemy and he was determined to destroy 
him; it was not until Jesus rose from the dead that he 
discovered how grievously he had been tricked in the 
bargain. Some of the old fathers said that the human 
nature of Jesus — the flesh — was the bait with which 
the devil was caught. 

For a thousand years the saints and prophets of the 
Christian church contented themselves with some such 
explanation as this of the atoning work of Christ. It 
was not the only explanation, but it was the one most 
widely held. What kind of a God did these good people 
believe in? 

The time came, however, when the moral sense of 
the church began to revolt against the immorality of 
this theory. "You tell us that God is good," men said. 
"Then your doctrine of the atonement cannot be true. 
We will not believe it." But the great leaders resisted 
and denounced this protest. It was heresy. Abelard 
was one of those who protested. St. Bernard of Clair- 
vaux, who was one of the noblest of the mediaeval saints, 
said that a man like Abelard, who disputed a doctrine 
which had been held by the church for a thousand years, 
could not be reasoned with but should be chastised with 
rods. And then, I suppose, after the hand-clapping 
ceased, the listening assembly joined in the ancient ver- 
sion of the song, the substance of which has been sung 
in every generation: 

"Tis the old time religion, 
And it's good enough for me," 



152 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

Men's ethical insights were, however, by this time, 
sufficiently enlightened so that this theory had to be 
abandoned. It was followed by the theory of the great 
Anselm which held the primacy in theology for three or 
four centuries. This was the theory that man by his sin 
had inflicted upon God an infinite injury and dishonor. 
To repair this wrong was impossible for humanity, for 
if every mail and all men perfectly obeyed the divine 
law they would no more than fulfil their own obligation, 
and the vast outstanding debt, due to the outraged honor 
of God, would still be undischarged and the race would 
be hopelessly insolvent. But the Son of God, becoming 
perfect man, rendered by the perfect obedience of his 
life all that was due to God, and then, by his death 
which was purely gratuitous, accumulated a surplus fund 
of merit out of which the debts of believers in him might 
be paid. Being infinite, his sufferings had an infinite 
value, and sufficed to cover the obligations of all who 
availed themselves of his salvation. 

This transaction, you will observe, was essentially 
commercial ; it is hard to see how it accounts, in the 
remotest way, for the real facts of the moral and spirit- 
ual life. Yet it is somewhat less crudely repulsive to the 
moral sense than the ransom theory which it super- 
seded. 

After this came the legal and penal theory which, 
in various forms, prevailed among the Protestant 
churches, during and after the Reformation. That the- 
ory rested on the necessity for the vindication of law. 
The law of God was armed with a penalty which is 
death, spiritual and eternal. The first man was the fed- 



THE ATONEMENT. 



153 



eral head of the race. He was made so, not by any con- 
sent of his descendants, of course; he was so constituted 
by the divine decree. For what he did we are all held 
responsible. He disobeyed the law and we are therefore 
all guilty and punishable for what he did. The penalty 
is due and must be inflicted, else the law will be dis- 
honored and the government of God will be impaired. 
Sin cannot be forgiven, it must be punished. God's na- 
ture demands this. It is not, however, essential that the 
sinner himself should be punished; the law will be sat- 
isfied, God's justice will be satisfied, if a suitable sub- 
stitute can be found on whom the punishment may be 
inflicted. Christ, as the infinite Son of God offers him- 
self as that substitute; the punishment is inflicted on 
him ; God's justice is satisfied and those who accept him 
as their substitute are thus released from punishment. 

The moral difficulties which this theory raised in 
men's minds, as soon as they began to think about it, 
were very serious. In the first place they want to know 
how it can be possible that billions on billions of hu- 
man beings can be held responsible and punishable for 
the sin of the first man, to which they could have given 
no assent, in which they had no part whatever. 

In the second place the doctrine was based on an 
idea of justice which contradicted our most fundamental 
ethical institutions. It assumed and taught that justice 
was sat lisfied if penalty was inflicted, whether on the 
guilty or the innocent. Instead of saying, "The soul 
that sinneth it shall die," it said, "If any soul sins, some- 
body must die, no matter who." It taught that guilt 
and the punishment of guilt, can be transferred from one 



154 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

person to another. "It is impossible," says Dr. William 
Newton Clarke, "for punishment of sin to be visited 
upon any one else than the one who has committed it, 
Punishment is absolutely untransferable, and no one can 
possibly be punished for the sin of another. Others may 
suffer for it, but their suffering is not penal. From its 
very nature, punishment can fall upon the sinner alone." 

It was a horrible imputation upon the character of 
God to say that such a thing could be. No matter if an 
innocent person did offer to endure the penalty due to a 
guilty person, any human judge or ruler who would in- 
flict upon the innocent the punishment due the guilty, 
and declare that thereby justice was satisfied, would be 
execrated and driven from the judgment seat. 

"Yes," says some one, "but justice in God is unlike 
justice in man. What would be wrong in us might be 
right in him, for he is infinite and we are finite." 

Let us pause right here. This is a matter about 
which our heads must be clear. If morality in God is 
a different thing from morality in man it is not possible 
that there shall be any moral relations between God and 
man. If the principles on which he acts are not funda- 
mentally the same as the principles on which we are re- 
quired to act — if there is no moral reciprocity between 
us — then his rule over us is simply tyranny and it is im- 
possible for us to love him or even to respect him, and 
we cannot feel any obligation to obey him. There may 
be many mysteries about the being of God that our intel- 
lect cannot fathom, but if he is our moral Ruler, morality 
must be essentially the same for him and for us. 



THE ATONEMENT. 156 

"Not mine to look where cherubim 

And seraphs cannot see, / 

But nothing can be good in him 
That evil is in me." 

John Stuart Mill was everlastingly right when he 
said, "I will call no being good who is not good in the 
sense in which I apply that word to my fellow men, and 
if such a being sends me to hell for not worshipping him, 
to hell I will go." 

It is impossible, then, for any man of sane morality 
to admit the justice of punishing an innocent person for 
a guilty person's sins. The fact that the innocent person 
consents has nothing to do with the case; it is the ad- 
ministration of justice that we are talking about; it is 
the character of the judge that we are considering; and 
the proposition to transfer the penalty of a guilty person 
to an innocent person would be abhorrent to any just 
judge, or to any righteous government. The idea that 
justice could be satisfied by such a transaction is simply 
monstrous. 

From an ethical point of view, then, the theory is 
impossible. It is equally absurd from a psychological 
point of view. The statement is that Christ bears the 
penalty of our sins. What is the penalty of our sin? 
The answer is that it is death. "The wages of sin is 
death." "The soul that sinneth it shall die." It is not 
only and not chiefly the death of the body, that is the 
common lot of human beings, and it befalls those who 
avail themselves of the salvation provided as certainly 
as those who do not. If physical death is the penalty 
of the law, Christ does not relieve us of that. 



156 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

What is the death that is the penalty of sin? What 
are the elements of this penalty? 

"The sense of guilt, remorse, a condemning con- 
science," says Dr. Clarke, "is an element in penalty," Is 
this transferred from the sinner to Christ? 

"The disapproval of the holy and loving God" says 
the same authority, "is an element in penalty" Was this 
transferred from the sinner to Christ? It has long been 
taught that it was. The cry of Jesus on the cross, "My 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me," has been so 
interpreted. I cannot believe that it should bear any 
such interpretation. I cannot believe that Jesus could 
ever, for one moment, have felt himself deserted by the 
Father. I suppose that Jesus, in that agony, began to 
repeat a psalm, the twenty-second psalm, the words of 
which were very familiar to him, which begins with these 
words : "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?" and which describes, very vividly, an experience 
like that through which he was then passing, but ends 
with a great song of victory: "He hath not despised 
nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, neither hath he 
hid his face from him; but when he cried to him he 
heard." No, I can never believe that Jesus, in the mo- 
ment of agony, was forsaken or believed himself to be 
forsaken by the ever faithful God. 

"Moral deterioration is an element," the chief ele- 
ment, "in penalty." Was this transferred to Christ ? The 
penalty of sin is sin. Did Jesus suffer moral deteriora- 
tion? 

"The tendency to evil permanence in the states that 



THE ATONEMENT. 157 

follow sin" is an element in penalty. Did Jesus Christ 
suffer this? 

These are the central elements in the penalty of sin. 
All this we clearly saw, when we studied, in former lec- 
tures, the nature of sin and its penalty. To say that they 
were transferred to Jesus Christ, is a suggestion simply 
horrible. 

It is true that these very things have been said, a 
great many times. The old theologians did not flinch 
from affirming just such things as these. They taught 
that Christ, as our substitute, did actually become a thief, 
a robber, an adulterer, a murderer; that he knew him- 
self to be such and was punished as such. They said 
that he actually suffered in his soul, in his consciousness, 
the pains of hell. 

The first settler and chief magistrate of the city of 
Springfield, Massachusetts, my old home, was William 
Pynchon. He was a man of learning and piety, not a 
clergyman, and his mind revolted at these teachings 
about Christ. He wrote a book entitled "The Merito- 
rious Price of our Redemption," which he had printed 
in England. In this book he upheld the doctrine that 
the sufferings of Christ were penal, but he rejected the 
notion that he actually suffered remorse and the pangs 
of hell in his soul. That was the extent of his heresy. 
But the theologians of Boston heard from England some 
reports about the heresies contained in this book, and 
when the ship bringing the printed copies arrived in 
Boston, they seized the package and burned the books 
on Boston Common. Only four or five copies were 



158 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

saved. I have had one of them in my possession and 
have read it carefully, also the books that were written 
to confute its teaching. So it is true that it has been 
believed that Jesus Christ as our substitute did actually 
suffer the spiritual and eternal death which is the pen- 
alty of sin. But it is safe to say that nothing so hor- 
rible as this has been taught in any theological seminary 
in this country, for the past hundred years. And I 
think that there are few reputable theologians of any 
rank in the world to-day, who would have the hardihood 
to deny that the infliction upon an innocent person of 
the spiritual penalties which are the portion of a guilty 
person is a psychological absurdity. It is simply im- 
possible for any sane man to believe that Jesus Christ 
endured remorse, the sense of guilt, a condemning con- 
science, alienation from God, moral deterioration, and a 
tendency to permanence in the states that follow sin. 
But these are the essential elements of penalty. How 
can any one who knows anything about spiritual laws 
and their penalties maintain that any such transfer can 
take place? 

I ventured the other day to say that this doctrine 
of penal substitution is not taught in modern theological 
seminaries. My statement was disputed, and I wrote to 
four of the leading Presbyterian seminaries to make in- 
quiry. President Macaffee of McCormick Seminary, in 
Chicago, answers thus: 

"If by a 'penal infliction' one means that Christ 
was a third party between God and man whom God held 
responsible for the sins of the world, certainly I do not 



THE ATONEMENT. 



159 



teach it. If, however, it means that Christ, being him- 
self the Son of God, did take upon himself the sin of 
the world and accepted its penalty, not as a third party, 
but as God himself, then I do teach it." 

This is not very explicit, but it is certainly not, in 
any proper sense, penal substitution. It does not repre- 
sent Christ as standing between God and man and pro- 
tecting men from the retributive wrath of God. 

The professor of theology at Union Seminary, Pro- 
fessor William Adams Brown, writes me : 

"While it is doubtless true that at some seminaries, 
as at Princeton, the penal theory is still taught, it is cer- 
tainly not true that it is taught in all our Presbyterian 
seminaries. It may be of interest to recall the fact that 
as long ago as 1837, at the time of the separation of the 
Old and New Schools, the governmental theory of the 
atonement was widely held in New School Presbyterian 
circles. As a church we are certainly not less liberal 
now than we were then." 

The "governmental" theory denied that the suffer- 
ings of Christ were penal, and held that they were ex- 
emplary. 

President George B. Stewart of Auburn Theological 
Seminary, writes as follows: 

"Replying to your inquiry, 'Do you teach in Au- 
burn Seminary the doctrine that Christ suffered the pen- 
alty of our sins — that his sufferings were a penal inflic- 
tion?' I beg to state I would answer it in the negative. 
The matter is most conspicuously dealt with by Professor 
Riggs in his Theology of the New Testament, and his 



160 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

position is that Christ died in our behalf and not in our 
stead. In his judgment the Greek is most clear on this 
subject." 

Professor Snowden, the Professor of Theology in 
Allegheny Seminary, sends me a book of his own from 
which I quote this: 

"The doctrine of the atonement has been stated 
in terms of purchase and sale, that have made it repel- 
lent to many minds. The justice of God has been rep- 
resented as vindictive vengeance. But such mercenary 
and barbarous notions have no place in this doctrine. 
The cross of Christ is the working out of the same prin- 
ciples in the heart of God that are experienced in the 
fatherly human heart. God must suffer for and with 
his children in order to redeem them, and yet vindicate 
and satisfy his own nature, and has experienced this 
Buffering from the beginning of human sin. The Cross 
on Calvary was only an outcropping or momentary 
glimpse of the inner and eternal atonement in the heart 
of God, — a reflection of 'the Lamb that hath been slain 
from the foundation of the world/ " 

These reports from several of the most prominent 
of the Presbyterian theological seminaries make it clear 
that the doctrines taught in these seminaries are as far 
from that ancient penal substitutionism as the east is 
from the west. 

The protest of the moral sense against the old penal 
theory of the Reformers made itself heard long ago, as 
Dr. Brown has reminded us; and an attempt was made 
by the great publicist, Grotius, to soften it by what is 
known as the governmental theory, which denies that 



THE ATONEMENT. 



161 



the penalty of the law is inflicted on Christ ; but affirms 
that it would endanger the divine government to for- 
give sin without making some show of severity, and that, 
therefore, suffering, not strictly punishment, was in- 
flicted on Christ by the Father, for the purpose of show- 
ing to the world how much God disapproves of sin, so that 
he might be merciful without undermining his authority. 
This is the theory which for the past century has been 
largely taught in New England. It seems to me, on 
the whole, morally and logically weaker than the penal 
theory. Its merit is that it exhibits the revolt of the 
moral sense against the anicent penal substitutionism. But 
how the world could get the impression that God ab- 
hors sin by beholding the Father inflicting what looks 
like punishment, but is not, on his well-beloved Son, it 
is not easy to explain. The answer is, of course, that 
he is treating him as if he were a sinner for purposes of 
moral impression upon us; acting toward him as if 
he were angry with him, when we know that he is not 
angry with him, but loves him all the while, in order 
that we may see, before we are forgiven, how we ought 
to be treated. It all seems unreal, theatrical ; we cannot 
wonder that it has lost its hold on thoughtful men. 

Of course it is true that the old penal theory of the 
Reformers, and the Grotian theory, still survive in the 
common beliefs and teachings of the church; they are 
not often explicitly set forth, but they are assumed, for 
substance, one or the other of them, in a good deal of 
orthodox preaching. It is astonishing how long a 
theological theory will live after its brains are out and 
its heart has stopped beating. Yet what Professor 

11 



162 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

Stevens has said in his book "The Christian Doctrine 
of Salvation" is the indubitable fact : 

"The theories which * * * interpret the work 
of Christ in mathematical, legal and official analogies 
are obsolescent. One may deem this a calamity but he 
cannot deny that it is a fact. * * * In the litera- 
ture of investigation, in the theological monographs and 
doctrinal systems which are attracting attention and 
exercising wide-spread influence to-day, these theories 
find, practically, no place." 

It is easy to see why these theories have either 
perished or become moribund. It is because they are 
morally defective. They ascribe to God traits of char- 
acter and principles of conduct which are repugnant to 
our sense of right. It is because men are compelled to 
believe that the Judge of all the earth will do right, 
that they cannot believe these theories. It is because 
a keener and clearer sense of what is right has been 
gaining possession of men's minds, that they cannot 
ascribe to God conduct which in men would be repre- 
hensible. 

How then, does the new theology explain the work 
of Jesus Christ? The teachers of the new theology 
have, as I told you, many ways of looking at this mat- 
ter; I cannot speak for any one but myself. But I 
will try to tell you, very briefly and simply, what seems 
to me to be the work that he has done for you and me, 
and for the world. 

In the first place, it may be well to say that those 
old figures of ransom, of debt, of juridical necessity, of 
governmental policy are utterly incapable of explaining 



THE ATONEMENT. 



168 



this matter. They are figures, analogies ; but they throw 
no light upon the deepest and most vital elements in the 
relation of man to God. When we begin to interpret 
the relation between our Heavenly Father and ourselves 
by the language of the military camp, or the merchant's 
ledger, or the courts of law, or the methods of govern- 
mental policy, we are sure to go very far astray. It is 
all a purely spiritual matter — a transaction between 
persons, a Father and his children; the interests of char- 
acter only are under consideration. 

The first answer to the question, what does Jesus 
Christ do for us men, is found in the first thing that was 
said about him after he was born: "His name shall be 
called Jesus [Savior] because he saves his people from 
their sims. It is from their sins, rather than from the 
penalties of their sins that he saves them. The old 
theology dealt mainly with the problem of the removal 
or remission of penalties; the new theology deals with 
the problem of getting rid of sin. It does not think it 
well to cancel penalties first; it teaches that the cause 
and not the consequence is first to be removed. If men 
will only cease sinning the penalties of their sins will 
not trouble them. 

The sin from which men need to be saved is two 
fold, — alienation or separation from God, and selfish- 
ness. 

As we said at the beginning, the work of Jesus is 
largly a work of reconciliation. The old theology taught 
that it was primarily, and mainly, a reconciliation of 
God to man; that God had to be appeased or placated 
or made propitions, so that he could forgive and save 



164 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

men. The new theology teaches that God does not need 
to be appeased or placated, and that nothing needs to 
be done for his government to make it possible for him 
to forgive and save the sinner; that it is man, not God, 
who needs to be reconciled; that it is the alienation and 
suspicion and fear in the heart of man that needs to be 
removed. This, indeed, is what the Scripture ex- 
plicitly says: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto himself " 

I think that it must be evident to all thoughtful 
men that in this part of the work of atonement some 
wonderful work has been done. The suspicion and fear 
with which men once regarded God has largely disap- 
peared from the minds of men in enlightened Christian 
lands. There is still, of course, much superstition, and 
multitudes are still in darkness ; but the prevailing ideas 
of God which are held by intelligent people in Christian 
lands today are very different from those which were 
held a thousand years ago or even a hundred years ago. 
The dread of the Almighty Power which once held the 
souls of most men in thrall, has now largely disappeared ; 
we do not believe that he is hard and stern and pitiless ; 
we may know that there are reasons why he should be 
displeased with us, but we are sure that he will deal 
with us fairly and considerately and kindly. This is 
the common thought about God which enlightened men 
in Christian lands, even those who make no profession 
of faith, have learned to cherish. 

How has this change been wrought? Is it not the 
result of what Jesus has revealed to us concerning the 
Father? Is it not part of his reconciling work? Who 



THE ATONEMENT. 165 

else has taught us to think these more rational and hope- 
ful thoughts about God? 

1 think that I have never heard this spoken of 
as part of the atoning work of Christ, but it seems to me 
that it ought to be so regarded, and that it must be plain 
that we are all sharers in the benefits of that work of 
reconciliation. There is no one here whose thoughts of 
God are not different thoughts from what they would 
have been if Jesus Christ had not lived and died. For 
many of us he has not yet done all that ought to have 
been done; but for all of us he has done much in open- 
ing the way to God. 

"If he had not lived and died," I said. That sen- 
tence indicates another difference between the old and 
the new theology. The old theology found all the value of 
his reconciliing work in his death; the new theology 
finds it in his life and teachings as well as in his death. 
His death was the supreme illustration of his character ; 
but it is by what he was and said and did, as well as 
by what he suffered, that he has reconciled us to God. 
It is by revealing to us the character of God that his 
atoning work is done. What he always claimed for him- 
self was that he represented and revealed the Father; 
that his thoughts and feelings and actions and suffer- 
ings were a manifestation to us of God. When Philip 
once asked him to show his disciples the Father, his 
answer was, "Have I been so long time with you and 
yet hast thou not seen me, Philip? He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father." 

This is the atonement, it is the revelation of God 
to men. When they see him as He is and know Him, 



166 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

they are reconciled to Him. If they are not it is their 
own fault, and they know it. And Jesus, in that last 
prayer of his, just before Gethsemane, most solemnly 
declares this great truth : "This is life eternal, that they 
should know thee, the only true God, and Him whom 
thou didst send even Jesus Christ. I glorified thee on 
the earth having accomplished the work which thou 
gavest me to do." Could there be a more explicit 
statement ? 

The claim that Jesus made for himself, and that 
the whole verdict of the centuries has verified, was that 
hei was one with the Father. Looking in his face we 
see the brightness of the Father's glory. And not only 
in the purity and truth and holiness of his character 
does he reveal to us the Father, but also and especially 
in his suffering and self-denying love. In the wilder- 
ness, on the mountain top, among the throngs of suffer- 
ers, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, comforting 
the sorrowful, lifting up the despairing, sitting at meat 
with publicans and sinners, weeping by the graves of 
those whom he loved, agonizing in the garden over the 
world's sin, lifted upon the cross by the world's malice 
and selfishness, he is showing us the Father. 

Is it not clear that if the world believed that Jesus 
Christ represents God, manifests God, that revelation, 
that manifestation would be a most effectual means of 
reconciling the world to God ? 

The alienation and fear and suspicion by which 
the human mind has always been oppressed, when it 
has tried to comprehend the unknown Reality behind 
nature, must surely yield to such a revelation as this. 



THE ATONEMENT. 



167 



All religions are attempts to answer the question, "How 
shall man make his peace with God?" The answer of 
the Christian religion is Jesus Christ. "Behold the 
Man!" it cries. "He is the Revelation of God. Look 
at Him, listen to Him and you will know what to 
think of God. All of God was in Him that humanity 
can contain; all of God was revealed in him that hu- 
manity can know. He is the Way and the Truth and 
the Life. By the revelation which he makes in his per- 
son of the character and purposes of God, distrust and 
enmity are slain, and men, who were afar off, are brought 
near." 

The old theories represent Christ as standing be- 
tween men and God, as protecting us against the wrath 
of God or taking our part in our controversy with God, 
or making some governmental adjustment by which it 
becomes possible for God to be merciful and forgiving. 
In the phrase which Professor Macaffee repudiates, he 
is a third party between man and God, who does some- 
thing which God could not or would not do, or who 
suffers something which God could not or would not suf- 
fer, by means of which men obtain pardon and salvation. 
All the old theories involve some such notion as this. 

The new theology utterly rejects all such concep- 
tion. It denies, as Professor Macaffee denies, that there 
is any third party in the transaction. It declares that 
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten 
Son. It proclaims that God was in Christ reconciling 
the world unto himself. It takes no crown from the 
brow of that Strong Son of God who has shown us the 
Father, but it rejoices to accept the revelation, and it 



168 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

bows down with thankful love before the God and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ finding in Him the source of 
all that reconciling work which it delights to proclaim. 

"The supreme power in the universe," says Profes- 
sor Lyman of Bangor, "is an atoning God. The atone- 
ment which Christianity really teaches us to believe in, 
when seen in its full dimensions, consists of a principle 
eternally active in the nature of God. The conception 
of God which the New Testament presents, is that of a 
God who is always striving for the moral recovery of 
his erring children. His tenderness 'and forbearance 
toward the sinful are visible in the sunshine and rain 
which he sends upon them as upon the good. His for- 
giving love is seen in the joy with which he welcomes 
back the wayward son who is no more worthy of the 
name. He is the shepherd who seeks the lost sheep until 
he finds it." * 

This, let us remember, is what Jesus has taught us 
about God. The father in the parable of the prodigal 
son is Jesus' picture of God. The good shepherd is 
Jesus' representation of God. We generally apply it to 
Christ himself, and of course it describes him, but only 
because he represents the Father. It is the infinite, re- 
deeming, saving love of God that he is telling us about 
in this parable. 

Professor Stevens has a chapter on "Eternal Atone- 
ment," from which I take this paragraph: 

"To me the words 'eternal atonement' denote the 
dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean 
that God is, by his very nature, a sin bearer, — that sin 
* "Theology and Human Problems," p. 194. 



THE ATONEMENT. 



169 



grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and 
suffers in consequence of it. * * * Atonement, on 
its 'Godward side,' is a name for the grief and pain in- 
flicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this 
divine sorrow for sin the sufferings of Christ are a rev- 
elation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he ex- 
perienced on account of sin, we see reflected the pain 
and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love. Thus 
Christ's work is grounded in an eternal fact — the sin 
bearing and suffering of God. In whatever sense Christ 
was the Representative of God, so that in him men see 
the Father; in whatever degree he was the interpreter 
and example of the divine feeling toward sin, in that 
sense and degree his suffering with and for men in their 
sins has its ground in the vicarious suffering of the 
eternal Love." * 

There is the atonement, in the heart of God — the 
heart of the father crying out after his erring chil- 
dren, like David in Mahanaim after the rebel boy: "O 
Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had 
died for thee ! O Absalom, my son, my son !" 

The eternal Father suffers, always suffers with and 
for his children, and saves them by suffering with and 
for them. Instead of saying, with the old theology, 
"God must punish sin; he may be merciful to the sin- 
ner," the new theology says, "God must suffer if his 
children sin ; by his suffering he seeks to save ; if he 
punish, it is only to reclaim." As Patterson Dubois has 
said: The true father's attitude toward his disobedient 
child is not, "I will conquer that child, no matter what 

* "The Christian Doctrine of Salvation,' p. 422. 



170 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



it costs him," but rather: "I will help that child to 
conquer himself, no matter what it costs me." That is 
what the true father must say. 

This eternal atonement shows us not only the in- 
finite compassion of God, it shows us also the heinous- 
ness of sin. It is against such love as this that we are 
always rebelling. It is upon this infinite patience and 
gentleness that we are turning our backs. Every evil 
deed we do, every vile or hateful thought we cherish 
costs a pang to the heart of our Father. And the revel- 
ation which Jesus has made of the Father's love is of 
no value to us, except as it shows us the exceeding sin- 
fulness of sin, and makes us hate it, as God hates it. 

How God hates the sin which is bringing loss and 
weakness and misery upon his children, every father 
knows. And every father knows that it is only when the 
boy comes to see the sin as he sees it, and to hate it as 
he hates it, that there is any hope for him. If anything 
will save the boy, it will be the discovery by him of the 
suffering which his sin is bringing to his father and 
mother. The pale and haggard face of a dear wife, the 
wistful and troubled looks of precious children — these 
are the silent voices by which many a man has been 
roused from selfish indulgence to make a stand for his 
manhood. 

There may be some one here who can read that 
language in the faces of those who love him — some one 
who knows, even though he tries to hide the truth from 
himself, that by his wayward conduct, or his fading 
ideals, or his sordid aims he is deepening the shadows 
in which some who are dear to him are walking. There 



THE ATONEMENT. 171 

may be some one here who knows that there are hearts 
which are wrung with grief and anxiety, not because 
of any unkindness which he has shown to them, but 
simply because of what he is, and is becoming. God 
have mercy on you, man ! Don't press that cup of agony 
to those loving lips ! Are you willing to take your own 
pleasure at the cost of their suffering? 

Many a man has heard that call and has turned to 
better ways. And when he has looked back he has 
known that it was suffering love in the hearts of his 
dear ones that revealed to him the sinfulness of sin and 
made him hate it. And he has said to himself, more 
than once, "They bore my sins, in their own bodies and 
souls, and thus they saved me. It was their suffering 
love that redeemed me." 

And so it was. They were working together with 
God and with Christ when they did it, though they may 
not have been conscious of it. They were partners with 
Christ in his sufferings. As Paul says, they were "fill- 
ing up that which is behind in the sufferings of Christ." 
They were carrying forward that eternal atonement 
which has been going forth from the heart of God from 
the foundation of the world. 

It is by suffering love that men are saved from sin. 
It may be revealed to you by your wife or your mother, 
but she learned it of Jesus Christ, and he found it in 
the heart of the atoning God. It is all one, wherever 
you find it. 

This is the doctrine of the atonement as the new 
theology has taught it to me. It has made all life divine 
for me; I think that I know what it means to live. It 



172 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



has made Jesus Christ very wonderful to me; it has 
made the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ very 
dear. It has not made sin a light thing ; it has revealed 
to me the meanness and hatefulness of wrong doing as 
I never knew it before, and it has given me reasons for 
wanting to be rid of it which that old theology could 
never have suggested. And when I think of the old 
notions about God which used to haunt my mind, I am 
filled with a great wish that men could get rid of them 
and could come to know the dear Lord and Father of 
mankind, whom Jesus has made known to me. I am 
sure that if they knew him they could not help loving 
him. And it seems a pathetic thing that this pitiful and 
patient God, who through all the generations has been 
seeking to make known his forgiving and saving love 
to his children, should have had such things thought 
and said about him as these we have been considering 
tonight ; that men should have insisted on believing that 
he needed to be placated and appeased; that he could 
never be forgiving until he had had a sight of blood; 
that his children could not get near him except through 
some legal formalities; that unless there were a substi- 
tute to stand between him and us, his wrath would sweep 
us to destruction; yea, and when in his great love he 
sends his own Son to declare his love, in a great self- 
sacrifice, this messenger of his grace should have been 
turned by our perverse thought into a Mediator who 
softens his wrath instead of a herald who reveals and 
manifests his forgivingness. Isn't it a tragedy? 

O pitiful God, forgive us ! What right have we to 
dishonor thee by such dreadful doubts of thy goodness? 



THE ATONEMENT. 173 

Help us to put away from our minds all these dark 
thoughts. May we not fear to trust in thy loving kind- 
ness. Let us Christians try to come as near to thee as 
did that old friend of thine, far back in the centuries, 
who could say: 

"The Lord is full of compassion and gracious, 
Slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. 
He will not always chide, 
Neither will he keep his anger forever. 
He hath not dealt with us after our sins. 
Nor rewarded us after our iniquities. 
For as the heaven is high above the earth, 
So great is his mercy toward them that fear him. 
As far as the east is from the west, 
So far hath he removed our transgressions from us. 
Like as a father pitieth his children, 
So the Lord pitieth them that fear him; 
For he knoweth our frame, 
He remembereth that we are dust." 

Into this great faith in thee as the atoning God, 
help us all to come, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 



VIII 

FORGIVENESS, 

(175) 



"God dropped a spark down into every one, 
And if we find and fan it to a blaze, 
It'll spring up and glow like — like the sun, 
And light the wandering out of stony ways. 
God warms his hand at man's heart when he prays, 
And light of prayer is spreading, heart to heart, 
It'll light all, where now it lights a part." 

John Masefield. 



"Though sin too oft, when smitten by thy rod, 
Rail at 'Blind Fate' with many a vain 'Alas !' 
From sin through sorrow into thee we pass, 
By that same path our true forefathers trod ; 
And let not Reason fail me, nor the sod 
Draw from my death thy living flower and grass, 
Before I learn that Love, which is, and was, 
My Father, and my Brother, and my God." 

Alfred Tennyson. 



(176) 



VIII. 

FORGIVENESS. 

WE are to study at this time the fact of for- 
giveness. It is closely connected with the 
fact of atonement; forgiveness is, indeed, 
the act or the experience in which atoning love finds ex- 
pression Atonement originates in the heart of God; 
when it is received and accepted by the sinner we call 
it forgiveness. It is a transaction which all takes place 
in the spiritual world. But it has become confused and 
entangled with facts of the natural order, and the first 
thing to be done is to separate these two things which 
do not belong together. 

The belief in the uniformity of natural law lies at 
the basis of scientific investigation. It is, as we shall 
see, a belief. It cannot be verified. No man ever dem- 
onstrated it; no man ever will, Science starts with an 
act of faith. All its magnificent achievements rest 
on the assumption that nature can be trusted, that like 
causes will always produce like effects. 

Does the scientific man know that the same causes 
will always be followed by the same effects? No, but 
he believes that they will. Does the religious man know 
that there is a God? No; but he believes that there is. 
Science as well as religion is founded on faith ; I do not 
see why the act of faith with which the religious man 
sets out is not just as rational as the act of faith with 
which the scientific man begins all his investigations. 
12 (177) 



178 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

The belief in the uniformity of nature is, I suppose, 
a rational belief. But this does not mean that the laws 
of cause and effect hold sway in the realms of reason 
and affection. In physical nature these laws do hold; 
and man is a part of physical nature, allied, in some 
portions of his being, to physical nature, and subject, 
therefore, to these natural uniformities. But he is over 
nature, also; by his reason and his free will he is ele- 
vated above the plane on which these natural forces 
work, and the logic of causation can give no explanation 
of his conduct in those higher realms of thought and 
feeling. 

Now it is often assumed that the laws of the lower 
realm, the laws of our physical nature, condition our 
whole experience ; that the uniformities which are ex- 
pressed in our natural life are not less fixed in our 
spiritual life. If that were true there could, of course, 
be no such thing as the forgiveness of sins. In the phy- 
sical world law is uniform and inexorable; you cannot 
step in with an act of pardon between a cause and its 
consequence. And those who think that all the phe- 
nomena of what we call the spiritual world are explained 
by natural laws, cannot, of course, believe that forgive- 
ness of sins is possible. 

This skepticism is prevalent. There are many per- 
sons among us to whom the doctrine we are considering 
seems unscientific and absurd. If a man sins, they say, 
he must suffer, and there is no possibility of securing 
a remission of his suffering. He may be sorry for it, 
but the sorrow will make no difference, the punishment 
will be inflicted just the same. There is no such thing 



FORGIVENESS. 179 

as a suspension of penalties in nature. Whatsoever a 
man soweth that shall he also reap. The governor may 
pardon a convicted criminal and set him free, but there 
is nothing resembling this in nature's laws, and nature's 
laws are the laws of God. 

Beyond a doubt this fact of the uniformity of law, 
and of the irreversible and irremediable character of our 
acts, on which modern science puts so much stress, has 
had great influence of late upon men's speculations in 
the realm of morals and religion. Many persons have 
the idea that repentance is useless, that forgiveness is 
impossible ; and that the whole gospel is, therefore, fun- 
damentally erroneous and unphilosophical. "All these 
notions of pardon and forgiveness of sin," they say, 
"grow out of those old and untrue conceptions of God 
as an arbitrary, yet changeable Being; one who is some- 
times angry and sometimes kind, one who threatens us 
sometimes with penalty, and then repents and withholds 
the infliction. We have outgrown all these ideas of the 
ntfulness of the divine Being; we believe that he is un- 
changeable; we believe that he governs the whole uni- 
verse by inexorable laws, therefore we find no room in 
our theories for this doctrine of forgiveness. It is a 
survival of a childish theology, and bears no true rela- 
tion to the thought of this time." I am persuaded that 
thoughts and feelings akin to these are very common in 
our time, and that they are often a great impediment in 
the way of some who are struggling with the evil and 
longing for a better life. If you make a man believe 
that the wrong which he has done is absolutely irrep- 
arable; that there is no such thing as forgiveness and 



180 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

salvation ; that his bad past is there, an indelible record, 
which never can be blotted out; that the injuries which 
he by his own evil doing has inflicted upon himself 
must be suffered forever, you have extinguished in his 
breast all the strongest motives to better living. We are 
saved by hope; unchain that anchor and the soul is 
adrift on the stormy seas of impulse and passion. 

There is need, therefore, of a more careful state- 
ment of this doctrine of the divine forgiveness as it 
stands related to the uniformities of natural law. And 
it may be well at the outset to clear away the miscon- 
ceptions with which the subject has been encumbered, 
to show what the Scriptural doctrine of forgiveness is 
not. 

1. It is not true that God's purposes or feelings to- 
ward the sinner are at any time changed, — so that, where- 
as he was once unfriendly and inexorable he becomes 
compassionate and kind. No such change in the divine 
Being ever takes place. No compensation offered to his 
justice was ever needed to make him merciful to the 
sinner; no repentance of the sinner himself is the cause 
of any such modification of God's thoughts and pur- 
poses toward him. The forgiveness of sins does not 
imply any change in God. His compassions are from 
everlasting to everlasting. 

2. Nor is it true that these laws under which suffer- 
ing and degradation follow sin are ever relaxed in their 
operation. They go on enforcing themselves relentlessly. 
If you thrust your hand into the fire it will burn; the 
fact that you are sorry will not make it stop burning; 
no prayer that you can offer will quench the consuming 



FORGIVENESS. 181 

flame. If you perform an act of cruelty or treachery, 
your soul will be embittered and your heart will be hard- 
ened; if you continue in that course of action the result 
will be a steadily increasing darkness of mind and dead- 
ness of sensibilities. The law under which falsehood, 
dishonesty, perfidy, selfishness, bigotry, intolerance, cen- 
soriousness being moral disease and moral debility and 
disorder and confusion and suffering into the soul, is a 
law that is never relaxed in this world, and never will be 
in any world. Forgiveness does not set this law aside. 
If the forgiven man violates the law of integrity, the 
law of love, he must take the consequences, he cannot 
escape them. There is nothing in forgiveness, there is 
nothing in grace, there is nothing in the mercy and com- 
passion of God which even for one moment repeals or 
suspends the law which makes spiritual death the conse- 
quence of sin. Every saint on earth, every angel in 
heaven is under that law and always will be. In this 
sense punishment is eternal. Suffering, and moral deg- 
radation, are inseparably and eternally annexed to wrong- 
doing; the link that binds them together is firm as 
adamant; in no world will this connection ever be sev- 
ered; the consequences of sin must be the same in all 
worlds and forever; where the wrong is done, there 
waits the retribution, instant and relentless; the fire that 
scorches the evil doer is an unquenchable fire. 

This is the great fact which the student of nature 
seizes upon and which leads him to deny that any such 
thing as forgiveness is possible. But his denial rests 
upon a partial view of the case. The law under which 
suffering and moral degradation are inseparably joined 



182 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

to sin is never set aside, but when the sinner turns from 
his sin to righteousness another and higher law than 
that of retribution comes to deliver him from his sin. 

If a man thrusts his hand into the fire it will burn ; 
that law will operate in the millenium just as certainly 
as it does today. But if he withdraws his hand from the 
fire it will not only cease to burn, but certain kindly 
forces of nature will go to work at once to repair the 
injury. Death, whose minister was the consuming fire, 
had seized upon his hand, but now life summons its 
forces and seeks to triumph over death. If the work of 
destruction has not gone too far the victory will be won; 
the injury will be repaired, the hand will be whole and 
sound again, death will be swallowed up of life. 

By eating unwholesome or poisonous food, by ex- 
haustive labor, by dangerous exposure, by reckless con- 
duct you may greatly impair your own health. Just as 
long as you pursue these injurious courses you will con- 
tinue to suffer, and your suffering and weakness will in- 
crease; but if you turn from them, before it is too late, 
and adopt a rational and hygienic regimen, the waste and 
injury will be stayed; you will gradually recover your 
lost health and strength; you may be as well as you 
ever were, though perhaps not quite so well as you 
might have been, if you had always obeyed the laws of 
health. 

It is evident, therefore, that there is, even in nature 
herself, some sign of a reparative and restorative power 
by which the consequences of wrong doing may be over- 
come and in great measure counteracted. These healing 
energies of Nature, by which great and severe injuries 



FORGIVENESS. 183 

are often repaired, the wasted bodily powers restored, 
and life, which seemed to be almost gone, is vigorously 
renewed, — these are the foretokening, even in nature 
herself, of a gospel of forgiveness and help. It is with 
this tendency in nature itself that the good physician al- 
lies himself. His study is to get the obstructions out 
of the way and to give the restorative powers of nature 
a chance to do their work. His main reliance is upon 
this vis medicatrix naturae — this healing power of na- 
ture. There is a gospel in the very tissues, whose efficacy 
he seeks to call forth. Yet note that there is in all this 
no interruption or suspension of the law under which 
suffering and the diminution of the powers of life are 
annexed to disobedience, as their ne:essary consequences. 
The penal and destructive forces are never for a moment 
restrained or relaxed; the fire is there, and if you thrust 
your hand into it, it will burn; gravitation is there, and 
if you slip from the precipice it will fling you down; 
the laws of health are there, and if you transgress them 
you will suffer. 

Precisely the same thing is true of the moral and 
spiritual life. When a man ceases from his evil ways 
and turns to God, the divine grace immediately begins 
a work of restoration in the soul. The injury that sin 
has inflicted upon the moral nature may be very great; 
the heart may be hard, the imagination foul, the will 
perverse of weak, but the remedial energies of the divine 
love have power to restore the soul to health and vigor. 
When sin is admitted into the soul death entereth also, 
and its wasting and destructive work begins; but the 
law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus is able to make 



184 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

u« free from the law of sin and death. The knowledge 
chat God loves the sinner, in spite of his sins, and seeks 
to save him from his sins, is itself a mighty encourage- 
ment to one who turns from the evil. And this is the 
truth which is revealed to the sinner by the life and 
death of Jesus Christ. This is the atonement — the rev- 
elation of the suffering love of God. 

But this is not all, for the Spirit of all grace sur- 
rounds this struggling soul with all the gentle reinforce- 
ment of his own light and power, pointing out the right 
way, strengthening the weak purpose, quickening, com- 
forting, uplifting the soul, and thus gradually delivering 
it from the suffering and disability into which its own 
evil deeds have plunged it. And thus, I believe that any 
soul which has been injured by sin may by repentance 
and faith be made whole and sound. The ravages of 
death may be wholly repaired; even where sin has 
abounded, grace does so much more abound that it ob- 
literates the marks of sin. It sometimes seems to us, in 
this world, that the effects of our evil doing upon our 
own natures must be irreparable; that we can never 
wholly recover from them ; that we must always undergo 
some diminution of power and happiness because of 
them. I do not think that this is a necessary conclusion. 
Some things are indeed irreparable. Our neglect is ir- 
reparable; the work that we fail to do must forever be 
left undone. Opportunities of usefulness come to us 
every day that can never return; if they are not im- 
proved, our spiritual gains are by so much less, and the 
store can never be made up. And I doubt whether any 
of us will in this world fully outgrow all the injuries 



FORGIVENESS. 185 

which we have inflicted upon ourselves by our sins. But 
I do believe that in the endless future there will be time 
for entire recovery from all the wounds and weaknesses 
of sin, so that the salvation of the soul shall be entire 
and perfect, wanting nothing. The time will come, for 
the soul, as well as for the body, when death shall be 
swallowed up in victory. 

And this is not all. Not only is the divine grace 
ready to help the sinner when he turns from the evil; 
not only does it begin at once its blessed work of resto- 
ration in his soul, replenishing his wasted energies and 
repairing his injured faculties, so that he becomes a new 
man in Christ Jesus, but it begins this blessed work of 
recovery in him even before he turns from the evil; 
nay, it is by this prevenient and unsolicited grace which 
seeks out the sinner in his wandering, and surrounds him 
with blessed influences, and gently draws him away from 
his sins, that he is brought into the ways of repentance. 
As the good shepherd seeks the lost sheep, so the grace 
of God goes after the sinner, never leaves him, indeed, 
but follows him, through all his alienation and disobe- 
dience, to seek and to save that which is lost. 

"Let a man inflict upon himself a wound," says Mr. 
Alden, "let him injure himself by excesses; he is indeed 
in the way of death; but lo, all the strength of this in- 
dwelling God seeketh his relief, is set to the healing of 
his bruises, accommodating itself to the perverse ways 
he has chosen, in some cases transmuting poison into 
nourishment, willing not that any should perish. * * * 
Our sin is forever the burden of his care. In our mad- 
ness he patiently awaits the same thought and purpose. 



186 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

* * * Behold what long-suffering the Eternal hath 
had from the beginning of man's abuse and torture of 
his power, — all the pure sweet currents of his loving 
life made turbid and turned awry through their ming- 
ling with the perverse currents of a rebellious humanity, 
running away from God. Yet he pursueth, following 
men through every torturous path of folly and vice, and 
even into the charnel house of his spiritual corruption."* 
It is here that we sound the deepest depth of the 
divine compassion. God's forgiving love is manifested, 
not merely in helping sinners to escape from their sins, 
and from the consequences of their sins, when their hearts 
are turned toward him in penitence and trust; its great 
manifestation is that by which it follows the sinner in 
the paths of disobedience and folly and seeks by all the 
wisdom and strength of suffering love to reclaim him 
from his alienation and to bring him back into the ways 
of life and peace. Nor is there, in all this loving quest 
of grace and compassion, one moment's relaxation of 
those stern laws by which sin brings after it suffering 
and loss. The Father's heart goes out after the prodigal 
in all his wandering with tenderest compassion; nay it 
is the Father's love, the silent pleadings of his Spirit 
with the prodigal in the far country, that brings him to 
himself, and moves him to say, "I will arise and go unto 
my Father;" nevertheless, the hunger and the suffering 
and the misery are there, in that far country; the pains 
of that hunger are not for one moment assuaged; the 
prodigal will perish with hunger if he stays there; the 
only way to get away from that hunger and that danger 

* "God in His World," p. 135. 



FORGIVENESS. 



187 



of famishing is to get out of that country, and go home. 
It will never be made a pleasant thing or a safe thing 
for any prodigal to live in that country. 

I trust that this analysis has made plain the great 
central facts on which this doctrine of forgiveness rests. 
The fact that the moral laws are natural laws ; that they 
are, like all the other laws of nature, uniform in their 
operation; that they are not repealed or suspended in 
behalf of any sinner on earth or any angel in the sky, 
may be accepted as lying at the foundation of this whole 
subject. The student of natural science is warranted in 
his refusal to believe that the retributions of the divine 
law can be evaded or averted by the sinner or in his 
behalf. 

But the fact that the student of natural science 
fails to take into the account is that there is something 
besides law in this universe; that while God is law he 
is also love. His law he does not set aside; but his 
love constantly seeks to save men from the consequences 
of disobeying his law. He never remits the penalties of 
sin, but he labors and suffers and waits with infinite 
patience to persuade the sinner to turn from his sins, 
and thus escape their penalty; and he surrounds, with 
all the helps and safeguards of his mighty grace, those 
who turn from the evil, that he may restore to them the 
life and power and peace that they have lost. 

Let us bear in mind that our Christian faith is a 
faith in the forgiveness of sins, not in the annulling 
of penalties. The New Testament words most often 
rendered forgiveness means putting away, or releasing, 
unbinding, loosening; but it is spoken always of sins, 



188 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

and not of penalties. The divine grace seeks to release 
us from our sins, to set us free from our sins, — to 
loosen their grip upon us, to break the chains of evil 
habit, to lead us forth into the free ways of righteous- 
ness and peace. When we are once delivered from our 
sins, we need have no fear of their penalties, and it is 
not from the penalties of our sins that Christ comes 
to save us but from the sins themselves. 

It is generally imagined that God's forgiveness is a 
sovereign, an arbitrary act, an act of will; that he can 
forgive whom he pleases when he pleases; that forgive- 
ness is a mere exercise of the will of the one who for- 
gives, and is wholly independent of the state of mind 
of the one who is forgiven. But this is a great error. 
It all comes from building our theologies on the anal- 
ogies of human government. The governor can set a 
criminal free, no matter what the criminal's state of 
mind may be. He can cancel, by his prerogatives, the 
penalty of the crime. But God cannot set a sinner free 
from his sin, by an arbitrary act of power. 

Forgiveness is in one sense like a gift; it cannot 
be bestowed unless it is accepted. A gift must be freely 
received as well as freely given. That which another 
forces me to take is not a gift, it is an imposition. A 
gift implies a receiver as well as a giver. Forgiveness 
also implies a receiver as well as a giver. No man's 
sins are forgiven till he has himself, by his own free 
act accepted of forgiveness. No man's sins are for- 
given till he yields to the divine mercy and turns into 
the path in which God is leading him. There may have 
been forgivingness in the heart of God, but the forgive- 



FORGIVENESS. 189 

ness could not, in the nature of the case, be made effect- 
ive, until the sinner forsook his sins. 

I wonder if we could bring this truth home, and 
try to understand, as individual men and women, just 
what it means. Are our sins forgiven? Is there for us 
no sense of condemnation when we think of our own 
conduct? Or is there some consciousness of the divine 
disapproval, some feeling that the good God is saying 
to us what he said to the church at Ephesus, "I have 
somewhat against thee." Such feelings are not rare 
among conscientious people, although they are not so 
prevalent or so oppressive as once they were. But they 
are not comfortable feelings. No good man likes to be 
under condemnation. Sometimes they are very painful 
and distressing. I may be speaking to some one who 
is bearing a heavy burden of conscious guilt; who is 
saying, in the words of a hymn that I often joined in 
singing, sixty years ago, 

"0 that my load of sin were gone !" 

Well, why not be rid of it? What hinders your re- 
ceiving, here and now, free and full forgiveness? If 
what we have been saying is true there is no obstacle in 
the heart of God. There is nothing that he wants to 
do for you so much as to assure you of his forgiveness. 
There is no legal or governmental impediment, abso- 
lutely none. There is nothing more in your way than 
there was in the way of that prodigal in the far country. 
That father's wrath did not have to be appeased. No- 
body had to intercede with the father for the son, or to 
be punished in the son's stead. All the boy had to do 



190 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



was to go home and ask the father to forgive him. Nay, 
he was forgiven before he started for home, before 
he thought of going home, before he came to himself at 
all. The father did not wait for him to come home and 
confess his sin; "while he was yet a great way off, his 
father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and 
ran and fell on his neck and kissed him." That is what 
Jesus tells us about the divine forgivingness. Don't be- 
lieve any theology of forgiveness which contradicts the 
theology of Jesus. 

Why, then, are you staying under this cloud of 
condemnation? Why are you not forgiven? I am 
afraid that the impediment is in you. I am afraid that 
you are not forgiven because you do not want to be. 
Perhaps what you want is to have the penalty of your 
sin remitted, and not to get rid of the sin. Perhaps 
you rather like to cling to the evil ways that have become 
habitual with you; it is the consequences that you want 
to shirk. Well, there are theologians who can tell you 
how to get rid of penalties, but that is not in my line; 
I know nothing about any of those arrangements; the 
only thing I am interested in is in showing men how to 
get rid of sin. And when that is your honest wish noth- 
ing in earth or heaven or hell can stand for one moment 
between you and God's forgiving grace. It matters -not 
how great your sin has been ; it matters not how vile and 
cruel and false and mean you have been; if you want to 
be rid of your sin, the one thing you need to know is 
that the eternal God has been waiting, waiting, waiting, 
for a long, long time, for you to come to yourself and 
to come home to him. 



FORGIVENESS. 191 

There may be another reason why you have not en- 
tered into the peace of forgiveness. What is that prayer 
that we say every day? "Forgive us our debts as we 
forgive our debtors." And you remember the comment 
which follows: "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, 
your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you 
forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father 
forgive your trespasses." This may seem like an arbi- 
trary and severe judgment ; it is simply the expression of a 
psychological necessity. To be forgiven is to be brought 
into harmony with God, to be one with him in thought 
and wish and will. But God's atoning love seeks to 
reconcile all men unto himself; and his forgivingness 
embraces all his children. You simply cannot be in har- 
mony with him while you are at enmity with your neigh- 
bor. You do not share God's feeling toward your neigh- 
bor. The forgiveness is waiting for you, but there is a 
foe in your heart that will not give it room. O beloved, 
is it not clear that if we desire to be the children of our 
Father in heaven, we cannot have any enemies? 

This leads us on to a question which sometimes 
exercises the minds of casuists, whether man can forgive 
sins. 

I remember a newspaper controversy some years 
ago between two Columbus moralists over this question. 
One disputant said yes, and one said no. By the latter, 
the word forgive was used as if it meant pardon, or re- 
mission of penalty. 

"The assertion is," he said, "that a man can forgive 
any violation of God's will by others ; and this inference 
is inevitable that they can also remove any consequences 



192 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

which God himself removes." But God never removes 
the consequences of sins, until the sins themselves are 
removed; he seeks to remove the causes, not the conse- 
quences ; the sins, not the penalties ; and when the sins 
are removed, then his grace comes in to remove the con- 
sequences. 

Now, I do not believe that a man can forgive sins, 
alone, by his own prerogative. God himself cannot do 
that, as we have seen; for the forgiveness of sins is not 
an act of power but an act of grace, and it implies, for 
its completion, at least two consenting wills. But man 
may be a co-worker with God in this great work ; he may 
manifest to his fellow man something of that divine love 
which found utterance on the cross; and he may, by 
kindness and faithfulness and sympathy help in turning 
men from the ways of sin. Can one man help another 
to get free from the bondage of sin, to repent and turn 
to God? Then man may certainly be a co-worker with 
God in the forgiveness of sins, for this, as we have seen, 
is the essence of the divine forgiveness; it consists, first, 
and chiefly, in helping men to get free from the sins them- 
selves. And nothing is more certain than that one man 
can help another to shake himself free from the old bad 
ways and turn to God. 

But then, you say, the old bad past is there, with all 
its shame and misery, and the effects of it, too, are in 
the character of the penitent sinner. The consequences 
of his sin man cannot set aside. God's grace can help 
him to outlive these consequences, but man can do noth- 
ing for him. This part of the work of forgiveness must 
be done by God alone." I am not so sure of this. I 



FORGIVENESS. 



193 



think that men may be co-workers with God in this 
part of the work also. What are some of the conse- 
quences of this man's sins which divine grace now seeks 
to remove? 

He has lost the confidence of his fellow men. That 
is one of the penalties of wrong doing. You can help, 
surely, in removing this penalty. You can show him 
that the confidence of one of his fellow men is restored 
to him. 

He has lost his self-respect. You can help him, by 
respecting him, to regain it. 

He has lost that blessed heritage of good thoughts 
which are so great a comfort and stimulus to all good 
men; you can commune with him often; you can share 
your own thoughts with him, and thus help to fill his 
mind with better ideas and pure aspirations. 

His will is weak; you can help to strengthen it, 
by surrounding him with good influences, and by con- 
firming and applauding all his resolute choices. 

Thus it seems to me that the work which God's 
spirit is doing in this man's soul, to restore and heal and 
reinforce, to repair the ruin sin has wrought, is a work 
in which his fellow men may have large part ; that so 
far as the work of forgiveness is the work of healing 
and reclaiming the offender, it is not likely to be very well 
done unless men are very active in it. Tht truth is that men 
are called to be partners with Christ in every part of his 
work here in this world; that they are to fill up that 
which is behind of his sufferings; that they are to die 
with him upon the cross ; that they are to rise with him 
into newness of life; that they are to reign with him 

13 



194 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

upon his throne; that they must, therefore, enter into 
this great work of forgiving sin. The spirit that longs 
to save men from sin, the self-sacrificing love that fol- 
lows them into the wilderness to rescue them from sin, 
the sympathy and compassion that convinces them that 
there is help and friendship and opportunity for those 
that are lowest down and farthest off — it is this that 
is needed, more than anything else, in the work of saving 
men. We have been free enough in our offers of the 
divine grace, but the surest way, after all, to make men 
believe that God loves them, and forgives them and wants 
to help them, is to show them that we do. 

"There is a truth," says Frederick Robertson, "in 
the doctrine of absolution. God has given to man the 
power to absolve his brother, and so to restore him to 
himself. The forgiveness of man is an echo and an 
earnest of God's forgiveness. He whom society has re- 
stored realizes the possibility of restoration to God's 
favor. Even the mercifulness of one good man sounds 
like a voice of pardon from heaven; just as the power 
and the exclusion of men sound like a knell of hopeless- 
ness and do actually bind the sin upon the soul. The 
man whom society will not forgive nor restore is driven 
into recklessness." 

The sad fact is that the divine forgiveness fails of 
its blessed power in this world largely because it does 
not find such expression as it ought to find on human 
lips, in human lives, in your life and mine. We are 
quite too willing to leave all this work to God, but the 
great majority of those round about us who need for- 
giveness will never know what it is till they see it man- 



FORGIVENESS. 195 

ifested in the lives of their fellow men. You could not 
tell them what it is in such words that they would 
understand it, but you can show them what it is in such 
deeds that they can not help understanding it. This 
one truth that Christ always conveyed to the minds of 
the miserable people who crowded about him was that 
the past was not irreparable, that there was a chance for 
the worst of them, that the Father in heaven was wait- 
ing to receive and to restore those who had fallen lowest 
and wandered longest. And if we are the children of 
our Father in heaven, that will be a large part of our 
business in this world. 

"Whosesoever sins ye forgive they are forgiven unto 
them; whosoever sins ye retain they are retained." We 
have made this a priestly function, and have forgotten 
that we are all kings and priests unto God. These words 
were not spoken to the apostles; they were spoken to a 
company of the disciples. They are the simple state- 
ment of a fact one side of which we see illustrated every 
day. Certain it is that society possesses and exercises 
the power of retaining the sins of those who have fallen 
into evil ways. We can and do turn our backs on of- 
fenders, and shut them out of our sympathy, and prac- 
tically bar the gates against their return to respect and 
honor. 

How many a hapless woman is walking these streets 
tonight, outside her paradise; and the flaming sword 
which prevents her return is not God's wrath, but man's 
relentlessness. God's forgiveness can hardly be made 
effective in her case, because of man's — and woman's — 
unforgivingness. And do we not all know that if we 



196 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

could truly enter into fellowship with the Father and 
with his Son Jesus Christ in our attitude toward her 
and all such sinners, many of them would be saved 
from their sins? 

Beloved, it is borne in upon me, as the days pass, 
that this function of forgiveness is a large part of the 
business of the Church of Christ upon the earth. There 
are so many who need to be forgiven, and the atoning 
God, whose heart is always yearning over his wayward 
and unhappy children needs us to reveal and convey to 
them his forgiving grace. I do not see how it can ever 
be made known to them unless we make it known. Here 
are all the delinquents in our jails and prisons and work- 
houses; here are the vagrant and vicious and disorderly 
classes in society; here are the revolutionary elements 
in the industrial order — what is the attitude toward 
them of our Lord and his Christ? Is not the heart of 
the atoning God yearning over them? Is not his atti- 
tude toward them the right attitude for us? We are 
inclined to assume that our only business with these de- 
linquents is to punish them. I doubt whether we are 
called to punish anybody. I doubt whether any of us 
are wise and good enough to punish evildoers. It may 
sometimes be necessary for society to confine and re- 
strain those who have shown that they cannot safely 
be allowed their liberty; but to punish them — who 
knows enough to mete out the just retribution? There 
is only one thing that we have a right to do for them, 
and that is to forgive them — to convey to them as well 
as we can the assurance of infinite mercy; to help them 
to rise from their sin into the newness of life in which 



FORGIVENESS. 197 

they will be ready to accept the divine forgiveness, and 
come into harmony with God. 

This would be true, even if we were in no wise re- 
sponsible for the evil condition in which they find them- 
selves. But, in truth, there are reasons why we ought 
not to be too merciless in our judgment of them. As a 
wise and sane religious teacher has said: "Our po- 
litical, industrial and social institutions, beneficent 
though they may be shown to be in a large measure, 
nevertheless have ghastly by-products of moral injury 
which sometimes assume enormous proportions. Chil- 
dren, stunted by premature toil, women debilitated by 
cruel conditions of work, laboring men embittered by the 
ruthless exploitation of their labor, business men who 
are forced to choose between cheapening their honor and 
ruining their fortunes, young men and women with ab- 
solutely no chance to know what manhood and woman- 
hood means — has the Christian principle of atonement 
no bearing upon such moral sufferers as these? " 

And if w r e are to be partners with Christ in his 
atoning work for such as these, — if we are to bear 
their griefs and carry their sorrows with him, — then 
our hearts must also be enlisted in conveying to them 
the message of his forgiving love. 

And if toward these more flagrant social offenders 
our attitude must always be merciful, what else can it 
be toward the great multitude of our fellow men? 

O brother men, is not this the one thing needful, in 
the church of today, and in all our social life — more of 
the spirit of forgiveness, more of the Christly passion 
that longs to set men free from the bondage of their 



198 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

sins, to help them to break the bonds of sense and sel- 
fishness, to undo the heavy burdens of groveling use and 
vicious habit, to win them from the ways of hate and 
spite and resentment into the ways of friendship and 
good will? I beseech you, beloved, by the meekness 
and gentleness of Christ, that you seek to learn this les- 
son. Let us not suppose that we are going to reform 
the world by the fierceness of our judgments and the 
bitterness of our maledictions; the only power that will 
ever subdue the world is the suffering love of Christ re- 
vealed in human hearts and human lives. Our business 
in this world is not to learn how to censure, how to de- 
nounce, how to curse; but how to be patient, how to be 
merciful, how to forgive. 



IX. 



THE LIFE EVERLASTING. 

(199) 



"Life loveth life and good; then trust 
What most the spirit would, it must; 
Deep wishes in the heart that be 
Are blossoms of Necessity. 

"A thread of Law runs through thy prayer 
Stronger than iron cables are ; 
And Love and Longing toward her goal, 
Are pilots sweet to guide the Soul. 

"So life must live and soul must sail, 
And Unseen over Seen prevail, 
And all God's argosies come to shore, 
Let ocean smile, or rage and roar." 

David A. Wasson. 



"At end of Love, at end of Life, 
At end of Hope, at end of Strife, 
At end of all we cling to so — 
The sun is setting — must we go? 

"At dawn of Love, at dawn of Life, 
At dawn of Peace that follows Strife. 
At dawn of all we long for so — 
ing — let us go !" 
Louise Chandler Moulton. 

(200) 



IX. 
LIFE EVERLASTING. 

OUR theme tonight is the continuance of life after 
death and the manifestation of this life in hu- 
man form. In discussing this theme I find 
myself under some embarrassment. The subject is one 
which I have treated so frequently from this pulpit that 
it is difficult to say anything new. Several of these 
more carefully considered arguments have been printed 
and some of you are familiar with them. Naturally, I 
have sought to present, in these former discussions, my 
strongest reasons for the belief in a future life. To 
repeat these reasons in tlrs discourse would be weari- 
some to some of you, yet to pass them by would do in- 
justice to the argument. I must, therefore, remind you 
that what I say tonight is only a partial and fragmentary 
presentation of the subject, referring you for a more com- 
plete statement of my own belief to the chapter "Is 
Death the End," in the little book entitled "Burning 
Questions," to the chapter on "The Hope of Immor- 
tality" in "How Much is Left?" and especially to the 
little booklet entitled "The Practice of Immortality." 
For other and far abler discussions of the same theme 
read Dr. Munger's sermons in "The Freedom of Faith," 
and his noble essay on "Immortality and Modern 
Thought" in "The Appeal to Life." 

The Christian faith which I am trying to confess 
(201) 



202 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



is that the conscious life of the spirit does not terminate 
with the death of the body; that the physical organism 
is the shelter or the temple of an immortal life; that 
death is but the departure of the immaterial intelligence 
from its material habitation; that when the body re- 
turns to dust as it was, the spirit returns unto God 
who gave it. 

With respect to the fact of the continuance of life 
beyond the change which we call death the present day 
theology does not differ from the traditional theology; 
with respect to the manner in which that continuance is 
effected its teaching is perhaps somewhat different. 

There are those who suppose that modern science 
has undermined and overthrown this belief; that it has 
succeeded in identifying the body and the soul so com- 
pletely as to leave no room for faith in the separate exist- 
ence of the soul. This is a great error. I think that 
few of the great scientists of the present day make any 
such assertion; many of the greatest of them emphat- 
ically declare that there is not a particle of proof that 
thought is a function of matter, or that the human in- 
telligence does not exist apart from the body. The phe- 
nomena of mind cannot be explained by physical laws; 
there is no correlation between reason, imagination, rev- 
erence, affection on the one hand, and the chemical and 
physiological processes on the other. 

Professors Thoreau and Geddes, two of the most 
distinguished biologists, say: "We see, then, that while 
modern Biology no longer postulates a 'vital force', that 
is a hyper-mechanical factor, a mystical power, a non- 
material agent presiding over the activities of the body, 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 203 

it admits, through, probably, the majority of its ex- 
perts, that the phenomena distinctive of life cannot, 
at present, be re-stated in the language of chemistry and 
physics." * 

Professor J. H. Muirhead says: "The general re- 
sult of the analysis now generally accepted in psychol- 
ogy is the vindication for the mind of a reality of its 
own, independent of the physical order." 

Some materialists have spoken of consciousness as 
"a function of the brain," but John Fiske says this is 
"perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assump- 
tion that is known in the history of philosophy." 

Here is what John Tyndall said, a good while ago : 
"Granted that a definite thought and a definite mole- 
cular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do 
not possess the organ, nor, apparently, any rudiment of 
the organ which would enable us to pass from the one 
to the other. They appear together, but we do not know 
why. The problem of the connection of the body and 
the soul is as insoluble as it was in the pre-scientific 
ages." 

These testimonies of modern philosophers, all of 
them evolutionists, must suffice. But it ought to be said 
that the recent explorations in these borderlands of sci- 
ence, have greatly deepened the conviction in many of 
the most careful investigators, that there is something 
there which has to be reckoned with, something which 
cannot be brought under the law of the conservation of 
energy, something which no known physical theories can 
account for. 



♦"Ideals of Science and Faith," p. 55. 



204 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



Yet it is true that physical science is as powerless 
to affirm as it is to deny. It can produce no disproof of 
the continuance of life after the death of the body, 
neither has it any proof of it ; science is compelled to be 
agnostic on this question. It may bring us hints, sug- 
gestions, foregleams of the after life, but it can offer 
us no demonstrations. The life to come is to many a 
blessed hope, to some a strong expectation, it is to none 
an object of experimental or scientific knowledge. 

There are those, indeed, who claim to have had 
immediate communication with spirits who have departed 
from this life; but while I would speak with respect of 
those who entertain these beliefs, I must simply say 
,that all the evidence which has been presented to my 
mind of such revelations has seemed to be extremely un- 
convincing. 

There is no demonstration, by science, of a future 
life. But, as I have said, there are hints and sugges- 
tions of possibilities which are worth considering. It 
is noteworthy that most of those scientific men who 
maintain that there is no proof of a future life, yet con- 
fess that they hope for it. 

Even death itself seems to some of them to stand 
with a bony finger pointing to the future. 

"We shrink from the 'King of Terrors,' " says Dr. 
W. L. Walker, "but really he has been a very good 
friend to man. We have already seen that death came 
in to serve the development of higher life. Unicellular 
organisms may, in a sense, live forever, but they can never 
develop into anything higher. Apart from death there 
would have been no progress, and man would never 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 



205 



have been reached at all. And after he was reached, 
had not death continued operative, not one of us now 
living would have had the chance of participating in 
life; there would have been no room for us; not only 
'no platter for us at Nature's board', but no room for 
us in the world. Moreover, apart from death the ten- 
derest feelings and highest aims of Humanity would not 
have been awakened. Death is here as the servant of 
life. What a contradiction it would be, therefore, if 
that same ordinance of death should become the final 
destruction of the very life to produce and to serve 
which it came into play — when that life had reached 
its highest form. Death, therefore, which has as its 
function the promotion of life, cannot be the final de- 
stroyer of life which we have been too ready to imagine 
it might be. May it not rather still be, as it has been 
in the past, a means to a higher stage of being; may it 
not very well be true, 



'That death is but a covered way 
Which opens unto light'?"* 



Even the physicists open to us some startling pos- 
sibilities. Death dissolves these physical organisms 
which we inhabit; but may there not be something un- 
touched by this dissolution? "The chemical 'atom'," 
says Mr. Walker, "that makes up our bodies may all 
be dissolved, and yet something real, — the real essence 
of matter — will remain. Matter has been reduced to 
electrons, and, as Mr. Zimmerman says in his newest 
book, 'What do we Know about Electricity?' 'Electricity 
* Christian Theism," p, 401. 



206 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

may exist apart from matter/ This is not absolutely 
proved but it is highly probable. In that case electricity 
may be a sort of etherial matter, which, besides being 
always intimately united with ordinary matter, is also 
capable of existing independently. This, however, ap- 
plies only to negative electricity. * * * We have al- 
ready quoted the saying of a German scientist to the 
effect that our modern analysis of matter takes us to the 
borders of a new and as yet mysterious world. Is it not 
with this deeper reality that our whole mental life, and 
especially that deepest element of self and of character 
is ultimately in contact?" * 

Surely, if it is possible for electricity to exist apart 
from matter, it is not improbable that thought may ex- 
ist apart from matter. I must quote a little further in 
the same direction, for these are most suggestive in- 
quiries. That mind, so far as this present order is con- 
cerned, has a physical basis, is not questioned ; and death 
is the dissolution into atoms of this physical basis. "But 
science is now teaching us that these atoms are not ul- 
timate. What is ultimate, science is not yet able clearly 
to say. As far as it goes it is Ether in some form. There- 
fore, there may not really be that complete dissolution 
even of 'the physical' which has been imagined. So far 
as contact with the external world is concerned there is 
dissolution, and as far as consciousness is given by our 
relation to this world and the forces that play upon it, 
consciousness must cease. For such consciousness the 
grosser forms of matter are necessary in a vital condi- 
tion, and for this again we must have the circulating 

* Ibid, p. 431. 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 207 

blood. When these fail us, this-world consciousness 
ceases. But it by no means follows that the physi- 
cal basis of the mind is so completely dissolved that the 
Mind (insofar as it is related to such a basis) is de- 
stroyed, that all consciousness ceases, or that, if it does 
cease, it cannot be started again in relation to the stimuli 
of an etherial or spiritual world." * * * Must we 
not believe that "when death dissolves the chemical basis 
of our life, (and death can do no more) the etherial basis 
remains untouched and our life goes on in a higher 
world?"* 

Now let us clearly understand that these things are 
not set forth as scientific verities, nor even as scientific 
probabilities; they are simply possibilities to which 
candid scientific men have opened their eyes. They do 
not warrant us in affirming that life goes on after the 
body returns to dust, but they do warrant us in saying 
that the denial that it can is pure dogmatism. You hear 
such denials, now and then, from men who have some 
reputation as scientists, but they only show that scientific 
men can be dogmatic as well as religious men. No greater 
dogmatist than Haeckel has ever appeared among theo- 
logians; he was constantly saying that things couldn't 
be, when his wishes or his prejudices were his main 
reasons for saying so; and the explanation of the uni- 
verse which he offers us, in place of God and immortal- 
ity, is a sheer assumption, unproved. 

It would seem that if we want to find reasons for 
our belief in the reality and permanence of the spiritual 
world, we shall be obliged to look for it somewhere out- 
* Ibid, pp. 437, 438. 



208 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY, 

side the material world. If I wanted to prove my friend's 
loyalty to me, I would not think to obtain evidence of 
it by taking his temperature or counting his pulse or 
measuring or weighing him; I should have to look for 
it in other quarters. If I wanted to get the real value 
of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I wouldn't think to find 
it by counting the number of the notes, nor by estimating 
the number of foot-pounds of muscular power exerted 
by each of the seventy musicians in the performing or- 
chestra. Spiritual things are spiritually estimated. And 
we must not miss the truth for which the great philos- 
ophers of today, like Eucken and Bergson, so stoutly 
stand, that the spiritual realm has its own laws, its own 
standards, its own certainties. 

The great word of the spiritual realm is love, the 
sympathy of kindred souls; the affection by which one 
finds his joy in the well-being of another; the good will 
by which the gains of life are shared, and giving be- 
comes more blessed than receiving. This is not a fact 
of the physical order; you cannot, as I have said, verify 
it by any physical tests, but it is the supreme certainty 
of life. If anything about this life of ours is indisput- 
able it is that this principle is the highest thing in the 
universe. The universe comes to its fulfilment in love. 
Life, when it is finished, bringeth forth love. And, as 
a clear thinker, has suggested, "if the supreme law of 
life is love, then the Power that gives us to discern this 
— imposes it on U9, works it in us as the result of our 
experience — must itself be in such unison with that 
law, that we can confidently say, 'All's law and all's 
love.' It has made us so that we cannot bear to part 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 



209 



for ever from those whom it has made us love; and can 
that same formative and all-working Power permit us 
to be torn from itself by that which we have seen was 
employed as a means of reaching us?" And I think 
that there is something almost inevitable in the logic 
which drives us on to say : "The love that lives in us 
is in itself something of God in us. It belongs in its 
essence to a higher realm than the physical. With noth- 
ing is the personality so identified as it is with the love 
that inspires and dominates the life — it is its very 
essence, indeed. In the very existence of that love we 
have something in us that is deathless. Surely we must 
say with Emerson : 

"Hearts are dust, heart's loves remain ; 
Hearts love shall meet thee again.' " 

My deepest reason for believing in the everlasting 
life is my belief in the everlasting love. I am sure 
that the universe is reasonable. All science rests on that 
assumption. I am equally sure that it would not be 
reasonable if it was not grounded in love. And love, 
as the heart of the universe, is what I mean by God. 
And because I believe in a God of love. I believe in a 
future in which life can come to completion, and in 
which the millions to whom life in this world has been 
but a melancholy failure may come to their own. 

All this, as I have said before, is belief; it is not 
knowledge. I think it is a reasonable belief. It rests 
on probable evidence of many kinds, it is confirmed by 
arguments drawn from many lines of reasoning, and 
tendencies discovered in many fields of experience; the 
H* 



210 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



cumulative force of it when it is all brought together, 
is to my own mind very strong; yet it is belief and not 
knowledge. That ought not to discredit it. Most of 
the great interests of life rest on belief, not on knowl- 
edge. Every industrial and commercial enterprise rests 
on faith, confidence in men, confidence in success. No 
man knows how his business ventures are coming out, 
it is by faith alone that he walks in every such enter- 
prise. The statesman never knows how the governmental 
policies which he urges will work, but he believes in 
them and confidently advocates them. The pair who 
stand at the marriage altar plighting their troth do not 
know that wedlock will bring them happiness, but their 
faith is strong in each other and in the future. So in 
all the greatest concerns of life, belief is the basis of our 
action. Even science rests on a great act of faith, faith 
in the uniformity of natural law. This is not my word ; 
it is Mr. Huxley's. Listen to the great Agnostic : "The 
one act of faith in the convert to science is the confes- 
sion of the universality of order, and in the absolute 
validity, at all times and under all circumstances, of the 
law of causation. This confession is an act of faith be- 
cause, by the nature of the case, the truth of such prop- 
osition is not susceptible of proof." 

When, therefore, we find that so many of the great 
interests of the present life rest upon belief, upon prob- 
ability, the fact that conviction of the reality of the fu- 
ture life has no other basis need not lead us to regard 
it lightly. All our heaviest investments are made on 
the basis of probability. 

That all life will continue after death mav be the 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 211 

postulate of an ethical system; but there is no clear de- 
mand for an indefinite countenance of all kinds of ex- 
istence. The life that is life indeed will go on, but the 
life that is compounded of perishable elements has no 
such promise. The Scripture doctrine is that there is a 
life which is in its own nature indestructible; and that 
there is a semblance of life which tends toward disso- 
lution and decay. The life of the senses, the life which 
has its source and spring in things material and perish- 
able, the life that we live in common with the beasts 
of the field, is not the life everlasting. He that soweth 
to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, and the 
end of corruption is dissolution; but he that soweth to 
the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting. The 
endless continuance of life is, then, a promise, a hope, 
a glorious possibility; but it is not to any man an in- 
evitable fate. If we want to live forever we must live 
the kind of life that lasts forever. Such a life there is, 
the life everlasting. If we believe in it let us choose 
it and live it, here and now. 

I said at the beginning that the present day the- 
ology differed somewhat with the traditional theology 
with reference to the manner in which life is continued 
after death. The old theology confessed its faith in the 
resurrection of the body. There is no doubt that this 
phrase did originally signify — or was generally under- 
stood to signify — the resurrection of the identical body 
laid in the grave. It was supposed that the same par- 
ticles of matter which compose the body when it is de- 
posited in its last resting place are collected and re- 
animated in the morning of the resurrection. But, in 



212 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY 



the processes of thought this idea has been necessarily 
abandoned by intelligent persons, and a wholly new con- 
ception has been gradually read into this phrase. This 
new conception is partly the fruit of enlarged scientific 
knowledge and partly the result of a more careful study 
of the Scriptures. The one passage in the New Testa- 
ment which discusses this question most fully is the fif- 
teenth chapter of Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians ; 
and in this he distinctly rejects the idea that the resur- 
rection body will be identical with that which we lay 
down in the grave. He uses some pretty strong language 
in reproving the ignorance of those who entertain this 
notion. The body that we shall inhabit in the next 
world, he says, is no more identical with the one which 
we lay down in this, than the plant is identical with the 
seed. "Thou foolish one!" he cries: "that which thou 
thyself sowest is not quickened except it die, and that 
which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body which shall 
be, but a bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some 
other kind, but God giveth it a body even as it pleaseth 
him, and to each seed a body of its own." "So also is 
the resurrection of the dead." There could not be a 
stronger repudiation of the notion that the future taber- 
nacle of the spirit will be composed of the identical par- 
ticles of matter belonging to that body which we cast 
off, at the end of our earthly pilgrimage. 

We know that the bodies of our dead do literally 
return to the dust from which they were taken; that 
they mingle with the earth ; the elements composing them 
are taken up by plants and thus returned again to the 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 



218 



kingdoms of life, entering into grasses and grains and 
fruits which are the food of man, and thus passing by 
constant procession back and forth from life to death 
and from death to life. It is probable that there is not 
one human body here present which does not contain 
some elements which have belonged, at some time during 
the ages past, to other human bodies. It is probable 
that very few bodies are ever laid in the grave which do 
not contain some elements which were once before con- 
stituent parts of other human bodies, long since laid in 
the grave. How is it possible, then, that the very par- 
ticles of matter of which each body is composed when 
it is laid in the grave shall be collected and re-animated 
for the use of that particular individual. Many of these 
same particles of matter have belonged at death to other 
bodies, which have the same right to claim them. Any 
Christian student of biology when asked to accept this 
ancient theory <of tha resurrection can repeat Paul's 
"Thou fool !" with increased emphasis. 

"Just as our clothes wear out," says Sir Oliver 
Lodge, "and require darning and patching, so our bodies 
wear out ; the particles are in continual flux, each giving 
place to others and being constantly discarded and re- 
newed. The identity of the actual or instantaneous body 
is therefore an affair of no importance ; the body which 
finally dies is no more fully representative of the indi- 
vidual than any of the other bodies which have grad- 
ually been discarded en route; there is no reason why it 
should persist any more than they; the individuality, if 
there is one, must lie deeper than any particular body, 



214 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

and must belong to whatever it is which put the particles 
together in this shape and not in another." * 

But what, after all, is the body — your body and 
mine? What is the real essence of this living organism 
which we call the body? It is not the particles of matter 
which compose it, for these are constantly changing. 
The body which you inhabit today is no more composed 
of the same particles of matter of which it was com- 
posed a year ago, than is the Scioto River down at the 
Broad street Bridge composed today of the same drops 
of water that composed it a year ago. Constantly, from 
the air we breathe and the food we eat we are taking 
new material into our bodies; and as constantly by ex- 
halations and excretions we are casting off old material. 
The old notion that we have new bodies every seven 
years is a palpable understatement ; the process of change 
is much more rapid than that. 

Nevertheless, we say truly that the bodies which 
we inhabit today are the same bodies that we lived in a 
year ago or ten years ago; they certainly possess the 
same general characteristics, the same height (if we 
have reached majority) the same features; a substan- 
tial identity is maintained in the midst of all this change. 
What is it that abides through all these mutations? 
We know but in part, for here is the mystery of life 
which baffles all the investigations of science. But we 
do know that some co-ordinating principle, you may 
call it the principle of life, the vital principle, or what 
you will, is the constant force by which our bodies are 
organized and the processes of life are carried on. The 
* "Science and Immorality," p. H0. 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 215 

body is a building, and there is an unseen builder always 
at work ^upon it, repairing, renewing, reconstructing, 
changing it continually in every part, yet building al- 
ways by the same plan, maintaining the organic identity 
of the structure from year to year. Now death is the 
release of this invisible builder, from his task of build- 
ing with the earthly materials; and the resurrection is 
the resumption of his work in another sphere of exist- 
ence, where we may hope that with finer and more 
plastic substances he will biuld for the spirit a fairer 
and more enduring habitation. This organic energy, this 
coordinating principle of life is the real body; if this 
survives when the outward form perishes, and lives to 
rebuild a new tabernacle for the spirit in another world, 
the Christian hope is realized. There is no room for dog- 
matic statements about a matter so far removed from hu- 
man experience, and the hypothesis which I have sug- 
gested is only to be used as a possible explanation of the 
Scripture assurances of life beyond the grave, yet it is 
probable that some such meaning as this is now given 
by most intelligent believers to the phrase of the old 
creed which speaks of the resurrection of the body. 

Such a man of science as Sir Oliver Lodge does 
not find that phrase wholly absurd. "It is founded," he 
says, "upon the idea of incarnation; and its belief in 
some sort of bodily resurrection is based on the idea that 
every real personal existence must have a double aspect, 
— not spiritual alone nor physical alone, but in some 
way both. Such an opinion, in a refined form, is com- 
mon to many systems of philosophy, and is by no means 
out of harmony with science. 



216 



PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 



"Christianity, therefore, reasonably supplements the 
mere survival of a discarnate spirit, a homeless wan- 
derer or melancholy ghost, with the warm and comfort- 
able clothing of something that may legitimately be 
spoken of as a 'body' ; that is to say, it postulates a super- 
sensually appreciable vehicle or mode of manifestation, 
fitted to subserve the needs of future existence as our 
bodies subserve the needs of terrestrial life; an etherial 
or other entity, constituting the persistent 'other aspect,' 
and fulfilling some of the functions which the atoms of 
terrestrial matter are constrained to fulfil now. And 
we may assume, as consonant with or even part of Chris- 
tianity, the doctrine of the dignity and sacramental 
character of some physical or quasi-material part of 
every spiritual essence."* 

Literally and chemically construed this old phrase 
"the resurrection of the body," resolves itself, of course, 
into absurdity. But the real thought which has been in 
the minds of believers in all the ages is not absurd ; it is 
full of significance and power. We may sum it up in 
three propositions. 

1. I believe in the continuance of conscious life 
after death. 

2. I believe that this conscious soul will have after 
death a form of appearing, — that it will be personal 
ized, individualized, in such a form of life. 

3. I believe that this form of appearing will be 
the human form divine, in its ideal perfection. 

The first of these propositions I have already dis- 
cussed. The second expresses that sense of the sacred- 

* Ibid, p. 148. 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 217 

ness of the individual, the persistence of personality, 
which distinguishes Christianity from the Pantheistic 
faiths and especially from Budhism. It is the Chris- 
tian faith as contrasted with these other beliefs that 
Tennyson utters when he says: 

"That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall 
Remerging in the general soul, 

Is faith as vague as all unsweet ; 

Eternal form shall still divide 

The eternal soul from all .beside, 
And I shall know him when we meet." 

The third of these propositions merely embodies the 
feeling that the form which God has given to man in 
this world, the temple of his body, is, in its perfection, 
the ideal of physical beauty, and that it will, therefore, 
be after this type that the house not made with hands 
will be fashioned in the heavens. Such a belief tends 
to make sacred and honorable the life which we here 
live in the flesh, and it gives us a rational foundation 
for the hope of the recognition of our friends beyond 
the veil. 

Such, then, is the substance of the Christian belief, 
as now interpreted. I do not think that any of you will 
pronounce this belief absurd or unworthy; I think that 
you can all see that it perfectly harmonizes with our 
noblest conceptions and our purest intuitions ; that it not 
only lights up, with reasonable hopes, the life that is to 



218 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

come, but that it adds dignity and meaning to the life 
that now is. 

I know full well that these are but hopes; are 
they therefore valueless? We are saved by hope, Paul 
says ; and there is no other hope that is so full of saving 
power as this. Really it seems to us, when we confront 
these great possibilities, that life is worth living. Ex- 
istence in this world becomes sublime when we think of 
it as only the prelude of the life everlasting. Struggle, 
suffering, privation, we may bear with patience, if we 
believe that they are only the good discipline by which 
we are trained for nobler service by and by. The sor- 
rows that rend our hearts seem but light afflictions and 
for a moment, when we realize that they are working for 
us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 
And it seems to me that one who will carefully study 
the laws of growth, by which the individual is carried 
forward from the first frail beginnings of existence, 
from one stage to another, old things constantly passing 
away, and all things becoming new — until he attains 
the highest perfection of which he is capable here, and 
then only just begins to reach forth with strongest 
hope to the thing's that are before, — that one who 
studies the life history of any human being "from that 
first nothing ere his birth" — to the summit of glorious 
manhood — will feel that this life is but a fragment, 
that there must be something better, still beyond. In 
the eloquent words of Sir Edwin Arnold, "What does 
nature possess more valuable in all she has wrought 
here, than the wisdom of the sage, the tenderness of the 



LIFE EVERLASTING. 219 

mother, the devotion of the lover and the opulent imagi- 
nation of the poet, that she should let these priceless 
things be utterly lost by a quinsy or a flux? It is a 
hundred times more reasonable to believe that she com- 
mences afresh with such delicately developed treasures, 
making them the groundwork and stuff for splendid 
further living by the process of death, which, even when 
it seems accidental or premature, is probably as natural 
and gentle as birth; and wherefrom, it may well be, the 
new-born dead arises to find a fresh world ready for his 
pleasant and novel body, with gracious and kindred min- 
istration awaiting it, like those which provided for the 
human babe the guarding arms and nourishing breast of 
its mother. As the babe's eyes opened to strange sun- 
light here, so may the eyes of the dead lift glad and sur- 
prised lids to 'a light that never was on sea or land,' 
and so may his delighted ears hear speech and music 
proper to the spheres beyond, while he laughs content- 
edly to find how touch and taste and smell had all been 
forecasts of faculties accurately following on the lowly 
lessons of this earthly nursery! * * *" 

These words of Sir Edwin recall to us that saying 
of Gustave Fechner: 

"Man lives on earth not once but three times; the 
first stage of his life before his birth is continued sleep ; 
the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, 
waking for ever. * * * The act of leaving the first 
stage for the second we call Birth; that of leaving the 
second for the third, Death. Our way from the second 
to the third is not darker than our way from the first 



220 PRESENT DAY THEOLOGY. 

to the second; one way leads us forth to see the world 
outwardly; the other to see it inwardly." * 

O land of rest, of hope, of liberty and peace, where 
work is without weariness and joy without satiety, where 
many dear to us who have passed through that second 
portal are dwelling now, our thoughts fly forward to thy 
blessed labors and thy dear companionships, and we pray 
that the life everlasting, into whose unknown felicity 
thou dost invite us, may so possess our souls and shape 
our lives even here and now, that we shall pass, w T hen 
our hour shall come, by gentlest transition, from narrow 
rooms and broken homes and baffled endeavors here, into 
the liberty of the glory of the sons of God! 

*"Life after Death," pp. 14. 15. 



OCT 9 1913 



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